4 June 2026
"I've got an external hard drive" is the most common answer people give when asked about their backup strategy. It's also, in most cases, not actually a backup.
Here's why — and what a real backup looks like.
Fire or flood. If your house or office is damaged by fire or flooding, your external drive is almost certainly in the same location as your computer. Both are gone. Your "backup" is as destroyed as the original.
Theft. A burglar who takes your laptop will often take anything else on the desk — including the external drive sitting right next to it. Again, both gone simultaneously.
Drive failure. Hard drives fail. External drives, which often get knocked around, disconnected improperly, or simply wear out, fail more than internal drives. The average lifespan of a consumer external hard drive is three to five years. Many fail sooner.
Ransomware. If your computer is infected with ransomware, it encrypts everything connected to it — including any external drives that are plugged in at the time. Your backup becomes encrypted at the same moment as your originals.
The "last month" problem. Even if none of the above happen, an external drive only contains whatever was on it the last time you copied files to it. If you haven't plugged it in for six months, you've lost six months of data.
Security professionals use a principle called the 3-2-1 rule:
An external drive sitting next to your computer is one copy, on one type of media, in the same location as the original. It satisfies exactly none of the three criteria that make a backup reliable.
It's automatic. If you have to remember to plug in a drive and copy files, it will eventually stop happening. Life gets busy. Months pass. The backup becomes stale.
It's offsite. Your backup needs to be in a physically separate location. Cloud storage satisfies this requirement easily.
It's independent. Your backup shouldn't be connected to your computer during normal operation, so ransomware can't reach it.
Keep it. An external drive is a useful second local copy — fast to restore from, no internet dependency. But use it alongside an offsite backup, not instead of one.
Your external drive covers the speed case. Cloud backup covers the catastrophe case. Both together cover the bases that neither covers alone.
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No — keep it. An external drive is a fast, convenient local copy. The point is to use it alongside cloud backup, not instead of it.
Your files are encrypted in transit and at rest. A cloud backup account is not connected to your computer during normal use, so ransomware that encrypts your local files cannot reach it.
You can restore individual files, folders, or your entire backup — whatever you need.