How to Choose Backup Services and Software You'll Actually Use

The joke goes that there are two kinds of people: those who back up their data and those who haven’t lost everything yet.

- Jill Duffy

It’s painfully true. Losing your files can be heartbreaking, career-ruining, and expensive if you need to hire an expert to help you recover them. Backing up your data is a preventive measure that avoids all those problems. It sounds like a tedious chore, but it doesn’t have to be. There’s a backup solution for every kind of person—the lazy, the diligent, and everyone in between.

My take on backing up is that anything is better than nothing. I have to admit that my own backup plan is pretty disorganized. Contacts get saved to Google, so they’re in the cloud. I have some personal files on Dropbox, some in Evernote, some in iCloud. That said, if any of my computers or phones were to crash, get stolen, or burn up in a fire, I would be able to put the pieces of my digital life back together. It wouldn’t be fun or simple, but I could do it.

If you’re more ambitious (or you’ve been burned by data loss in the past), you’re probably ready for a thorough plan that makes it nearly effortless to restore all your data at once. The most thorough plan would involve making at least two backups, such as one online and one local. These plans cost more to maintain and take a little extra time to set up. A lot of us would rather trade some risk for a simpler solution.

That’s okay! You don’t have to be perfect to be better off than you are now.

HOW TO BACK UP YOUR DATA: THE LAZY PERSON’S PLAN

Can you back up your data with minimal effort and not pay anything to do it? Yes, but your plan will definitely have some weaknesses.

If you’re lazy and don’t want to spend any money, think about backing up your most important data first. For you, that might be your photos, music, contacts, or scanned documents, like old tax paperwork. It might be “everything on my phone but not my computer.” Whatever the case, identify it.