The right way to back up a laptop you travel with
A simple backup plan for the computer that goes everywhere with you.
Plan for a laptop that never comes home
Travel adds loss, theft, and accidental damage to the usual risks of drive failure. Your backup needs to be somewhere other than the laptop bag. A portable drive is useful, but not if it disappears with the computer.
Keep essential work in a trusted cloud service or another remotely accessible copy, and make a separate full backup before a long trip.
Use both automatic and offline copies
Set up your operating system's backup feature or a trusted backup app to run on a schedule. Encrypt external drives and test that you can restore a file from them before leaving.
For especially important files, follow the idea of three copies across two kinds of storage, with one copy away from the laptop. The exact tools matter less than being able to recover your work.
Protect the account too
Enable full-disk encryption, a strong screen lock, and multifactor authentication for your backup account. Save recovery codes somewhere you can reach without the laptop.
After the trip, confirm that backups kept running. An old backup is better than none, but a recent restore test is what makes the plan trustworthy.
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