System tower · floor

How to backup your computer, and against what exactly

The question how to backup your computer has no single answer, and not because the subject is complicated. It is because “backup” is one word covering at least four different jobs, and the tool that does one of them is no help at all with the others.

So the useful first question is not which software. It is which disaster.

That table is the whole of this floor, and the fourth row is the one worth sitting with. Both operating systems ship good tools, both write to a drive you connect, and a drive that lives in the same bag as the laptop shares whatever happens to the laptop. This is not a criticism of the software — it is a limit of anything plugged in, and it is the reason a second copy somewhere else is the part people skip and later need.

With the disasters separated, the tools become easy to place.

The Windows list surprises people, because all three are described as backup somewhere in the interface and only two of them copy your documents. A restore point will not bring back a deleted photograph. Microsoft is clear about what System Protection is for — reverting after “software malfunctions, driver problems, or other system errors” — and that is a real and useful job. It is just not this one.

Windows Backup is worth reading carefully too, because its shape follows from its purpose. It requires a Microsoft account and stores what it collects with that account, which is exactly right for the job it was built for — walking up to a new PC and finding your things there. It is a weaker answer to “my drive died and I need last Tuesday’s spreadsheet”, which is what File History is for.

On the Mac side the two rules Apple prints are the ones most often broken. Twice the capacity is not a suggestion — a backup disk the same size as the Mac fills up and starts discarding the old snapshots that made it worth having. And keeping other files on the backup drive is the habit that turns one device into a single point of failure for both your working copy and your safety copy.

None of this needs to be done well to be worth doing. An external drive plugged in on Sunday evenings, with either built-in tool pointed at it, puts you ahead of most people — and the gap between no backup and an imperfect one is far wider than the gap between an imperfect one and a perfect one.

The floors below take it four ways: the built-in tools on each system, choosing where the copies live, the phones and tablets that need their own arrangement, and the day it all matters — because a backup nobody has ever restored from is a belief rather than a fact.

What this tower will not do

It will not sell you backup software. Windows and macOS both ship something adequate, and for most people the paid tools solve a problem they do not have.

It will not tell you a restore point is a backup. Microsoft describes what it is for, and a deleted file is not on the list.

And it will not pretend an external drive is enough on its own. It is plugged into the machine it is protecting, and that covers three disasters out of four. What holds instead is simple: the description of each Windows tool is quoted from Microsoft and the Time Machine rules from Apple, both listed below with the dates they were read.