Data
Laptop data backup and restore: a plan that takes one evening
The drives that reach us for recovery almost always belonged to someone who meant to sort out backups next week.
A good laptop data backup is not complicated, and it does not need special software. What it needs is more than one copy, in more than one place, tested at least once.
The rule worth remembering
Keep three copies of anything you cannot lose. Store them on two different kinds of media. Keep one of them somewhere else entirely.
In practice that means the laptop itself, an external drive at home, and a cloud account. Consequently a failed disk, a stolen bag and a house fire are all survivable, and none of them needs a different plan.
Setting up laptop data backup this evening
Start with the cloud copy, because it needs no hardware. Windows includes OneDrive and it will sync Desktop, Documents and Pictures automatically once you switch folder backup on. That covers where most people actually keep things.
Then add the local copy. Plug in an external drive and turn on File History in Windows settings. It runs quietly in the background afterwards.
Finally, think about what lives outside those folders. Software licence keys, browser bookmarks, phone photos you moved across, and anything on a second internal drive. Those are the things people discover missing later.
The step almost everybody skips
Test the restore. Pick one file, delete it, and bring it back from the backup. It takes two minutes.
An untested backup is a hope, not a plan. We have seen drives arrive where the owner had been backing up faithfully to a folder that stopped syncing months earlier, and nobody noticed because nothing was ever restored.
Backing up when the drive is already failing
If the machine is slow, freezing or making noises, do not start a full backup and walk away. A struggling drive can fail completely under sustained load.
Copy the irreplaceable things first, in small batches. Photographs and documents before applications. Then stop using the machine.
The warning signs are listed in our guide to hard drive failure signs. If files are already unreadable, our data recovery process images the drive before touching anything.
Before any repair
Back up first if the machine still boots. We never format or wipe a drive without asking, but a backup means a repair decision is never also a data decision.
Independent failure statistics from Backblaze are worth a look if you want the numbers behind all this.
Worried about the drive before it fails?
We check drive health on every machine that comes in.