How to back up your phone and laptop properly: the 3-2-1 rule

Phones get lost and laptops die. The only question is whether your photos and documents survive.

The 3-2-1 rule

• 3 copies of anything important
• On 2 different types of storage, for example laptop plus external drive
• With 1 copy outside your home, usually cloud storage

A simple setup that works

1. Turn on cloud photo backup on your phone
2. Use OneDrive, Google Drive or iCloud for your documents folder
3. Once a month, copy everything to an external drive and unplug it

Test your backup: open one old photo from the cloud and one file from the external drive. A backup you have never opened is a guess, not a backup.