A WIRED reader tipped me off to the File History features in Windows, which performs automatic incremental backups on any folder you designate. Windows 11 offers Windows backup, which will back up most of your personal data to your Microsoft account, but it isn’t intended to fully restore your system, should a hard drive fail. Time Machine is smart too it will only back up files that have changed, so it won’t eat up all your disk space. Apple has good instructions on how to set up Time Machine so it will make daily backups to your external hard drive. It’s a wonderfully simple piece of software and possibly the best reason to buy a Mac. These days there is software that can automate all of your backup tasks. If you have to make a backup, you probably won’t. 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.Ī good backup system runs without you needing to do a thing. 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 6-terabyte “desktop” version that’s not much more ( $140 at Amazon). I like this 5-terabyte model ( $108 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. Even within brand names, though, some drives are better than others.
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