Why you need a data backup plan for your Mac or PC - before disaster strikes

In my experience, you have three backup strategies to choose from. Which one you choose involves equal parts personal preference and practicality. The biggest factor to consider is whether the data you need to back up is work related or strictly personal.

Here is a brief description of each one.

Just keep the important stuff

This approach is for people whose PC is primarily for casual personal use. If your IT department takes care of managing your work laptop and backing up work-related files to your company's network, you only need to worry about personal files: photos, digital photos and videos, and important documents. Backing up those crucial files to your preferred cloud service is the logical solution.

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If your system drive has a catastrophic failure, you will have to reinstall your operating system and apps, but you do not have to worry about losing those important files, which are safely tucked away in the cloud, with one or more synced copies available locally, just in case. On a PC running Windows 10 or Windows 11, you can use the Windows Backup app to automate the process of backing up files, apps, and settings to OneDrive.

Back up all data files

On a PC that you (and possibly other family members) use for work, school, and personal tasks, you might want to ensure that every data file for every user account is backed up for quick recovery in the event of a problem. You can back up everything (except the operating system, apps, and saved settings) to the cloud, a local drive, or both.

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This option lets you recover older versions of a file or folder after accidentally deleting it. It also allows you to retrieve an older version of a document that has been overwritten by more recent work, and it gives you the option to recover all data for all users if you migrate to a new PC, replace your primary storage, or reinstall your operating system from scratch -- or, in the worst-case scenario, if that PC is lost, stolen, damaged, or compromised by a ransomware attack.

Create a system image that you can restore to a new PC or Mac in case of disaster

This option is the one to choose if business continuity matters more than anything else. It is labor intensive initially, and it can require intermediate-to-advanced technical skills, but it will save you a tremendous amount of time if you need to recover quickly from a crash or upgrade to a new PC or Mac with the absolute minimum of downtime.

A system image includes everything on the target drive: hidden configuration files, installed programs, settings, and data files. Typically, the image file is saved on an external drive connected via USB; with the right software, you can save an image file to another PC or server on a local network or in the cloud.

Done right, a backup image is a perfect clone of the system configuration at the time it was taken. That means, of course, that you have to find a way to back up data files and other system changes you make after that image is created.

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Both Macs and Windows PCs include built-in software that can help with this task. MacOS has Time Machine, which can be used to do a full system restore. Windows 11 and Windows 10 offer the legacy Windows Backup client, which does image backups as well as allowing incremental backups of data files in common locations.

If you choose third-party software, you can create fairly sophisticated routines that capture occasional full images along with differential or incremental backups to keep you covered.