Backup Files and Your Entire Digital Life (2026): Hard Drives, Cloud-Based Tools, and Tips | WIRED

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Making backup files is boring, but the alternative—losing your data—is the kind of excitement no one wants. March 31 is World Backup Day, which is lame, but why not use this as the impetus to get everything backed up? Don't be like me. I once lost 80 pages of a novel to a bad hard drive. I had no backups. Maybe the rest of the world is thankful to have been spared those 80 pages. But who knows? If that hard drive had lived, I might be sipping a Mai Tai on a Maine beach with Stephen King right now.

Nowadays, I back up my data at least three times in three physically separate places. I know what you’re thinking—wow, he is really bummed about missing out on that Mai Tai. It may sound excessive, but it costs next to nothing and happens without me lifting a finger, so why not?

If the perfect backup existed, then sure, three would be overkill, but there is no perfect backup. Things go wrong with backups too. You need to hedge your bets. At the very least, you should have two backups, one local and one remote, both set up to make automatic backups. For most people, this strikes the best balance between safety, cost, and effort.

Updated March 2026: We’ve updated our hard drive recommendations, and fixed links and prices throughout.

Jump To:

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- Start With Your PC Drive

- Hard Drives

- Off-Site Backups: All-in-One

- Off-Site Backups: Separate Services

- Mobile Backups

- Tips and Suggestions

Start With Your PC Drive

Photograph: Tsvetomir Hristov/Getty Images

The best kind of backup is the one you never need because your main PC never fails. Good luck achieving that. However, while the PC that never fails may be unlikely, there are things you can do to head off potential problems.

My advice is, if you tend to keep your PC for a long time like I do, keep an eye on that drive. There are different drive monitoring tools for different operating systems. If you're using Windows there are some built-in tools, but they're overly complicated. I recommend CrystalDiskInfo for checking the health of your drives. If you have a Mac, the built-in Disk Utility app does a good job of scanning your drive to let you know if there are any potential issues. Linux users: GSmartControl is a good graphics user interface (GUI) app, and command-line options abound.

Most of these tools use the Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, or SMART status of the drive, to try to predict the health of the drive. SMART is implemented inside the drives themselves. The tools just read the data that's there to check, for example, the number of unreadable sectors, or any error logs. Tests on large sets of drives indicate that SMART is a reliable predictor of impending failure, but unfortunately drives can fail despite reporting issues via SMART. They can also run just fine, even when their SMART status is not good.

So while these tools can help you avoid some disasters, the unfortunate truth is that drives will fail with no warning. That's why we need backups. Let's start with the simplest: another hard drive.

Hard Drives

Courtesy of Western Digital

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Western Digital

Elements Desktop Hard Drive

$225 Amazon (8 TB)

$225 Adorama (8 TB)

The first backup is the simplest—buy an external hard drive and regularly copy your data to it. Regularly is key. You probably want your important files backed up daily and done automatically, without you needing to think about it.

The hardest thing about this step is figuring out which hard drive to buy. See our Best External Storage Drives guide for our favorites to back up and restore your data. The WD Elements drive above is our top pick for backups.

Backblaze, a backup company that currently stores more than 1 exabyte of data, and therefore has considerable experience with hard drives, periodically publishes its drive statistics, which have some helpful numbers to consider.

Unfortunately, what jumps out of that data is that longevity varies more by model than by manufacturer. That said, I suggest sticking with known names like Seagate and Western Digital. Still, even brand-name drives fail. I had a big-brand-name drive fail on me once and it was only four months old. What you get by sticking with the brand names is good customer service. In my case, the company replaced the drive without question.

Even within brand names, some external storage drives are better than others. Several of us here on the Reviews team have had good luck with Western Digital hard drives. I like the 8-TB model above, but if you want something smaller and more portable, the 5-TB My Passport Ultra has also been a reliable drive in my testing.

One nice thing about buying a drive for backing up your data is that you don’t need to worry about drive speed. Even a slow 5,400-rpm drive is fine. These slower drives are cheaper, and