![]() ![]() For most of us, that’s a mix of personal data-photos of the kids, videos, important documents-as well as less personal things, like downloaded media and all the system files that keep our PCs running the way we want them to. The last thing to consider when putting your backup system together is what you want to back up. If there are any problems in your system, you want to find them before disaster strikes. It sounds silly, but I strongly suggest you practice restoring your data before you actually need to. One important caveat is that you can’t really trust any backup system until you’ve actually restored from it. Again, Arq worked well in my testing-in fact, I used Arq to make backups for years and never had any problems with it-but it’s hard to justify the price when Duplicati is free. Another possibility is Arq, which will set you back $50. ![]() MSP360 worked well in my testing, but I did not find anything about it that convinced me it was better than Duplicati. It’s $30, but there is a free version with limited features. If Duplicati isn’t quite what you want, another option is MSP360 (formerly Cloudberry). You can change this behavior in the settings, but by default, this is how it works. A word of caution about something that bit me once during testing: When Duplicati can’t find a file-for example, if you’re having it back up data that’s on an external drive you sometimes don’t plug in-it will halt the entire backup until that drive is available. Then you pick which files you want to back up. To get started, click Add backup, and Duplicati will take you through the process of setting up an account at a cloud storage provider and entering your login credentials. The company retains each version of your file for 30 days, though you can increase that if you pay a little more. Backblaze works on both Windows and macOS, and the default settings will do a good job of backing up your data. If you don’t want to pay the $70 upfront, you can pay $7 a month. For $70 a year you can get unlimited storage for one machine. This is what we suggest for newcomers.Īfter testing a dozen backup services like this, I found Backblaze offers the best all-in-one backup-a good combination of features, price, and reliability. Some are all-in-one: You sign up, download the service’s app, and you’re done. You copy the file to the backup and then it’s never touched again.įortunately, there are plenty of cloud backup solutions available. That means if a file becomes corrupted, the corruption is then sent to Dropbox and cascades through all your backups. When you change a file on your computer, those changes are then synced to Dropbox. Those are all great ways to share and sync documents, but they aren’t good for backups. What you don’t want is something like Dropbox, Google Drive, or. (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. For example, I once lost a laptop to a lightning strike. ![]() This is a backup that covers that awful scenario of physical destruction. Of course, that is just another way of saying “on someone else’s computer.” In this case, I mean a server in a data center far from your home. The second backup I suggest is off-site, or in “the cloud,” as marketing departments call it. 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. But even so, you need a larger drive for backups than whatever is on your PC. 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. Get the largest backup drive you can afford. These slower drives are cheaper, and since the backup software runs in the background, you probably won’t notice the slower speed. One nice thing about buying a drive for backing up your data is that you don’t need to worry about drive speed. If you don’t mind a larger form factor, there’s a Western Digital 8-terabyte “desktop” version that’s not much more ( $155 at Amazon). I like this 5-terabyte model ( $110 at Amazon, $108 at Best Buy), which will back up this very article later tonight (it’s backed up to the cloud as I type, more on that in a minute). Several of us here on the Gear team have had good luck with Western Digital hard drives. In my case, the company replaced the drive without question.Įven within brand names, though, some drives are better than others. What you get by sticking with the brand names is good customer service. I had a big brand-name drive fail on me recently, and it was only four months old. That said, I suggest sticking with known names like Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi. Unfortunately, what really jumps out of that data is that longevity varies more by model than by manufacturer. ![]()
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