Backup Files and Your Entire Digital Life (2026): Hard Drives, Cloud-Based Tools, and Tips

Making backup files is boring, but the alternative—losing your data—is the kind of excitement no one wants. March 31 is World Backup Day, which is lame, but why not use this as the impetus to get everything backed up? Don't be like me. I once lost 80 pages of a novel to a bad hard drive. I had no backups. Maybe the rest of the world is thankful to have been spared those 80 pages. But who knows? If that hard drive had lived, I might be sipping a Mai Tai on a Maine beach with Stephen King right now.

Nowadays, I back up my data at least three times in three physically separate places. I know what you’re thinking—wow, he is really bummed about missing out on that Mai Tai. It may sound excessive, but it costs next to nothing and happens without me lifting a finger, so why not?

If the perfect backup existed, then sure, three would be overkill, but there is no perfect backup. Things go wrong with backups too. You need to hedge your bets. At the very least, you should have two backups, one local and one remote, both set up to make automatic backups. For most people, this strikes the best balance between safety, cost, and effort.

Updated March 2026: We’ve updated our hard drive recommendations, and fixed links and prices throughout.

Start With Your PC Drive

The best kind of backup is the one you never need because your main PC never fails. Good luck achieving that. However, while the PC that never fails may be unlikely, there are things you can do to head off potential problems.

My advice is, if you tend to keep your PC for a long time like I do, keep an eye on that drive. There are different drive monitoring tools for different operating systems. If you're using Windows there are some built-in tools, but they're overly complicated. I recommend CrystalDiskInfo for checking the health of your drives. If you have a Mac, the built-in Disk Utility app does a good job of scanning your drive to let you know if there are any potential issues. Linux users: GSmartControl is a good graphics user interface (GUI) app, and command-line options abound.

Most of these tools use the Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, or SMART status of the drive, to try to predict the health of the drive. SMART is implemented inside the drives themselves. The tools just read the data that's there to check, for example, the number of unreadable sectors, or any error logs. Tests on large sets of drives indicate that SMART is a reliable predictor of impending failure, but unfortunately drives can fail despite reporting issues via SMART. They can also run just fine, even when their SMART status is not good.

So while these tools can help you avoid some disasters, the unfortunate truth is that drives will fail with no warning. That's why we need backups. Let's start with the simplest: another hard drive.

Hard Drives

The first backup is the simplest—buy an external hard drive and regularly copy your data to it. Regularly is key. You probably want your important files backed up daily and done automatically, without you needing to think about it.

The hardest thing about this step is figuring out which hard drive to buy. See our Best External Storage Drives guide for our favorites to back up and restore your data. The WD Elements drive above is our top pick for backups.

Backblaze, a backup company that currently stores more than 1 exabyte of data, and therefore has considerable experience with hard drives, periodically publishes its drive statistics, which have some helpful numbers to consider.

Unfortunately, what jumps out of that data is that longevity varies more by model than by manufacturer. That said, I suggest sticking with known names like Seagate and Western Digital. Still, even brand-name drives fail. I had a big-brand-name drive fail on me once and it was only four months old. What you get by sticking with the brand names is good customer service. In my case, the company replaced the drive without question.

Even within brand names, some external storage drives are better than others. Several of us here on the Reviews team have had good luck with Western Digital hard drives. I like the 8-TB model above, but if you want something smaller and more portable, the 5-TB My Passport Ultra has also been a reliable drive in my testing.

One nice thing about buying a drive for backing up your data is that you don’t need to worry about drive speed. Even a slow 5,400-rpm drive is fine. These slower drives are cheaper, and since the backup software runs in the background, you probably won’t notice the slower speed. That said, I now keep two external hard drive backups: one on a traditional spinning drive and one on a more expensive SSD flash drive. A traditional spinning drive and SSD, even if purchased at the same time, are extremely unlikely to simultaneously fail.

Get the largest backup drive you can afford. Incremental backups—which is how all good backup software works—save disk space by backing up only the files that have changed since the last backup. Even so, you need a larger drive for backups than whatever is on your PC. A good rule of thumb is to get a backup drive that’s two or even three times the size of the drive in your computer.

A good backup system runs without you needing to do a thing. There shouldn't even be a backup process; it should just happen automatically. If you have to make a backup, you probably won’t. That's when the phrase “data loss” will enter your life.

These days, there is software that can automate all of your backup tasks so you only need to do the configuration once, and never have to worry about it again. As with checking disk health, the backup automation tools vary by operating system (and if you're worried about mobile data, keep reading, we'll get to that below).

Mac users should create automatic backups using Time Machine. It’s a wonderfully simple piece of software and possibly the best reason to buy a Mac. Apple has good instructions on how to set up Time Machine so it will make daily backups to your external hard drive. Time Machine is smart too; it will back up only files that have changed, so it won’t eat up all your disk space.

Windows 11 offers Windows Backup, which will back up most of your data to your Microsoft account, but it isn’t intended to fully restore your system, should a hard drive fail. A WIRED reader tipped me off to the File History features in Windows 10, which performs automatic incremental backups on any folder you designate. While File History works quite well in my testing—and can take the place of something like Time Machine if you go through and set it up for every folder you need to back up—it's a hassle to set up, and even more confusing in Windows 11. Windows just doesn’t have a utility like Time Machine, unfortunately.

To get Time Machine–level simplicity in Windows, you’ll need to turn to third-party software. I’ve had good luck with Macrium Reflect, which has a free option that does most of what you need.

Off-Site Backups: All-in-One

The second backup I suggest is off-site, or in “the cloud,” as marketing departments call it. Of course, “cloud storage” is just another way of saying “storage on someone else’s computer.” In this case, I mean a server in a data center far from your home. This is a backup that covers that awful scenario of physical destruction. For example, I once lost a laptop to a lightning strike. (Yes, I had a surge protector; it pretty much liquefied.) But since my data was backed up to the cloud, I was able to get everything back.

What you don’t want is something like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Sync.com. Those are all great ways to share and sync documents, but they aren’t good for backups. When you change a file on your computer, those changes are then synced to Dropbox. That means if a file becomes corrupted, the corruption is then sent to Dropbox and cascades through all your backups. That’s not what you want. A good backup never chang