I lost a hard drive in March. I lost another one in July. Both times, a backup I had forgotten about saved me. I’m writing this because the next person who loses a drive should also have one waiting for them.
What happened in March
I was working from a coffee shop. Closed the laptop, drove home, opened it two hours later, and the screen said the drive was not detected. The SSD had failed. I knew this because it had been making a small ticking sound the day before that I’d ignored.
I had about four years of customer files, tax records, contracts, and photos on that drive. I also had a backup on an external drive that I ran every Sunday. That backup was about a week behind. I lost a week of work. I did not lose the business.
The recovery cost me a Saturday and $130 for a new external drive. It cost almost nothing in actual data. That’s the only reason I’m being calm about it now instead of being panicked about it then.
What happened in July
July was dumber. I was on vacation for two weeks. I came back, opened my laptop, and a software update had wiped out a folder I didn’t realize the laptop wasn’t syncing. Photos from a job I was mid-way through. Estimates I’d drafted on the plane. Gone.
But I’d been running a cloud backup for about a year, almost by accident. It was a tool I’d set up because a friend told me to, and then never thought about again. The files came back within an hour.
If I had only had the external drive, I would have lost those files. The external drive was in a drawer in my office. The cloud backup was wherever the cloud is. Both mattered.
The rule that kept working
The rule is older than I am. It’s called 3-2-1. Three copies of your data. On two different kinds of media. With one of them offsite. It works because any one of the copies can fail and you still have two left.
In my case: the original on my laptop. A weekly backup on an external drive. A cloud backup that runs whenever I’m at home on Wi-Fi. That’s three copies, two media, one offsite. The setup is not sophisticated.
The 3-2-1 rule isn’t a marketing term. It comes from photo studios in the 90s who learned the hard way that fire and flood only need to take out one copy. They’ve been teaching it to anyone who’ll listen ever since.
What you actually need
You need a folder that holds the things you cannot lose. Customer files. Tax records. Contracts. Whatever is unique to your business. You need that folder backed up somewhere that is not your laptop.
An external hard drive costs about $80 for a 2TB. Backblaze, Carbonite, iDrive, and similar services cost about $7 a month for unlimited backup. You don’t need both, but you do need at least one of them, and you should not rely on just the laptop.
If you have a small business with a server or a NAS, the same logic applies. The NAS in your office is one copy. You still need the offsite piece. The cloud backup covers that.
What you do not need to back up: software you can reinstall, music you can re-download, movies you can re-buy. Back up the things that took you time to make or that came from other people. Everything else is recoverable without a backup.
The test most people skip
The thing nobody tells you about backups is that they break silently. A backup job can run every night for a year and not actually be writing files. You find out when you need it and there’s nothing there.
Twice a year, do a recovery drill. Pick a file at random from your backup. Restore it to a different computer or a different folder. Open it. Confirm it works. If the file is corrupt, missing, or empty, your backup isn’t actually backing up.
This takes 20 minutes. It is the most valuable 20 minutes you can spend on your business every six months. It is also the 20 minutes nobody wants to do.
What to do this week
Buy a drive. Plug it in. Run a backup of your main folders. Set a calendar reminder to do it again every Sunday. Sign up for a cloud backup if you can afford $7 a month. Configure it once, then stop thinking about it.
Put a note on your calendar for six months from now to do the recovery drill. When the reminder fires, do it. Not because you enjoy it. Because the next failure is the one that matters.
That is the whole system. There is no clever version of it. There is just the version that works, set up once, and forgotten until the day it matters.
The day it matters is going to come. You don’t know when. It is probably not today. It might be next year. The cost of being ready is about $100 and an afternoon. The cost of being unprepared is the business.