How to Keep a Backup That Works

You need a machine you already keep something on, and about twenty minutes to set the habit up.

Most backups fail quietly. Not at the moment they're made — at the moment they're needed, months or years later, when the thing being restored turns out to be corrupted, incomplete, or simply missing from wherever it was supposed to be kept. A backup nobody has ever restored from is a guess wearing a reassuring name. What follows is how to keep one you can actually trust.

Keep three copies, not one. One copy is a single point of failure with a comforting label. Keep three: the copy you use every day, a second copy on different storage in the same place, and a third copy somewhere else entirely — a different building, a different city, a spare drive at a friend's house, anywhere that isn't where the first two live. If a fire, a flood, or a simple mistake takes out one location, it can't take out all three at once.

Let a timer make the copy, not your memory. Set a scheduled job — cron, a system timer, whatever the machine already provides — to make the copy on its own, on a fixed interval you won't remember to do by hand. Don't leave your trust in it unquestioned, though. A job that's been silently failing for six months looks, from a distance, exactly like one that's been working the whole time.

Restore something on purpose, before you ever need to. Once a season, pick one file or one folder from the backup — not the newest one, an older one — and actually restore it somewhere separate from the original. Open it. Read it. Confirm it's really the thing you think it is. This single habit catches nearly everything that goes wrong silently: a copy job that quietly stopped running, a damaged archive, the wrong folder copied instead of the right one.

Keep one copy that doesn't depend on the first location. If every copy depends on the same power, the same router, and the same account as the thing being backed up, they aren't really separate — they're the same risk wearing a second coat. At least one copy should survive the first location going dark entirely.

None of this needs to be elaborate. A cheap drive kept at a relative's house, updated by hand once a month, beats a clever scheme nobody ever actually checks. The goal isn't sophistication. It's being able to say, honestly, "I've restored from this before, and it worked."