Most people believe they have a backup. Most people are wrong. Here's why home backups fail without ever telling you — and what to do instead.
We hear the same sentence most weeks, and it's almost always said with complete confidence: "It's fine, I've got it backed up." Sometimes it's true. More often, what's actually in place is a single external drive bought three years ago, a phone that syncs to a cloud account nobody has logged into since it was set up, or a folder on the same laptop that holds all the files.
The problem with home backups isn't that people are careless. It's that backups fail quietly. A drive that stopped being written to in 2023 looks exactly like a drive that's been backing up nightly. Nothing prompts you to check. There is no alarm. You find out on the day you need it, which is always the worst possible day to find out.
The question that matters
A backup only counts if you have successfully restored from it. Not "I think it's running." Not "the light is on." Actually restored, and checked that the files open.
External drives are the most common home backup, and they are also one of the least reliable places to keep one. They get knocked off desks, unplugged mid-write, carried around in bags, and left on top of a warm router for years. When one fails, the backup software usually just starts reporting errors that nobody reads. The drive sits there, powered and unhelpful, giving every appearance of doing its job.
This is the single most widespread misunderstanding we encounter. Sync services — the ones that keep a folder mirrored across your devices — are exactly that: synchronisation. They make sure every device shows the same thing. They do not keep a separate history you can go back to.
So if a file is deleted, corrupted, or encrypted by ransomware, the sync faithfully copies that change everywhere within seconds. The deletion propagates rather than being undone. People who thought they had three copies of something often discover they had one copy, faithfully reflected in three places.
The most common arrangement of all: all the photos are on the phone, all the documents on the laptop, and the two never meet. That's a single point of failure. Phones are lost, stolen, dropped in water and accidentally wiped by a factory reset that was meant for a different device.
Many households do have a second copy — on the laptop that was replaced four years ago and now lives in a cupboard, unpowered. Drives that sit unused for years are not a safe archive. Lubricants settle, components seize, and the machine may not start when you finally need it. It's also frequently the case that nobody remembers the login.
Backups can be configured wrong in ways that only become apparent when you try to use them — the wrong folder selected, the wrong drive as the destination, an account that quietly ran out of storage and stopped accepting new files eighteen months ago. This costs nothing to check and nobody ever does.
The industry standard for backup is short and worth committing to memory: three copies of anything important, on two different types of storage, with one of those copies held somewhere else entirely.
The original plus two backups, so two things can fail before you lose everything.
Different technologies fail differently, so don't keep two copies on the same kind of drive.
One copy somewhere other than your home — because fire, flood and theft don't spare cupboards.
For a household, that might look like this: photos on your phone and laptop, a monthly copy onto an external drive that lives in a drawer and is only connected while in use, and a genuine backup service — not a sync account — holding a dated version in the cloud. Note the word "dated". You want to be able to go back to last month, not just to whatever is true right now.
There's an asymmetry people rarely think about. A lost spreadsheet is annoying. A lost decade of family photographs is irreplaceable — and unlike documents, photos are usually only ever stored on the device that took them, in a format the owner never handles directly.
Two practical points. First, if you are the person who holds the family photos, tell somebody else where they are and how to get at them. A backup that only you can locate is not much of a backup. Second, printed photographs are not a backup either — but keep a handful of the most important ones printed anyway. They have survived decades longer than most hard drives manage, and they don't need a password.
A habit worth keeping
Once every few months, pick one file at random from your backup and open it. Not the folder — the actual file. If it opens, you have a backup. If it doesn't, you've found the problem while it's still only a nuisance.
If you've already lost something — a deleted album, a failed drive, a phone that stopped working — don't assume it's gone. In many cases it isn't, and the sooner it's looked at, the more of it there is to save. If you're not sure whether what you have counts as a backup, we're happy to look at it with you and say honestly.
Bring it in and we'll check it with you. And if something has already been lost, talk to us before you assume it's gone.