Backups for freelancers and solo workers: the 3-2-1 rule without a NAS or an IT person

Backup guides talk about servers, NAS boxes and racks in a server room. If you work on your own, you have a laptop, a phone and a few online services, and you usually find out you don't have a copy on the day you need one.

The good news is that the rule companies use works on a small scale too, and it doesn't cost much.

What actually needs backing up

Before you decide where, it helps to know what. For a solo business, these are the things you can't recreate:

• invoices, receipts and accounting records, which you have to keep for ten years;
• your work files: client projects, designs, copy, price lists;
• product photos and design source files, which take days to redo;
• client contacts and your job history;
• the list of your accounts and their recovery codes.

If you work in Italy, e-invoices get some extra help: the Agenzia delle Entrate (the Italian tax agency) offers a free e-invoice storage service, which you turn on from the "Fatture e Corrispettivi" area. Treat it as one more copy, not the only one.

The 3-2-1 rule, on a small scale

The rule says: three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, one of them away from home. For one person it looks like this:

• the first copy is the one you work on, on your computer;
• the second is an external drive at home, updated automatically;
• the third is online, on a different service from the one you work in.

On a Mac, Time Machine handles the drive copy; on Windows, File History does. You set them up once and they run on their own every time you plug the drive in. The external drive is a one-off cost, the online service a few euros a month.

Sync is not a backup

This is the most common mistake. A service that syncs a folder between your computer and the cloud copies your mistakes too: if you delete a file by accident, or ransomware encrypts your documents, the change reaches every copy within seconds.

A real backup keeps old versions. If you use a sync service as your third copy, check that it has version history and how many days it keeps. Without it, you have two copies of the same problem.

Test a restore

If you've never tried restoring a backup, you don't know whether it works. Every three months, open a random file from the external drive and one from the online service, and check that it opens and is up to date. It takes five minutes.

We do this every month on the Hustlo database: a copy is restored into a separate database and compared with the original, automatically. For a laptop the manual version is enough, but the rule is the same.

Your accounts matter as much as your files

A lot of your data no longer lives on your computer but in accounts: your online store, your email, your bank, the software you subscribe to. Losing access to one of them is like losing a drive.

The first account to protect is your email, because that's where you recover the passwords for everything else. Turn on two-factor authentication there first, then on every work account. Use a password manager instead of repeating the same password, and print your recovery codes: a sheet of paper in a drawer is the only copy no virus can reach.

Your clients' data

Your clients' names, addresses and phone numbers aren't only yours: you're responsible for them. Keep them where they're needed, behind a password, and not in five copies scattered across your phone, USB sticks and email attachments. A tidy backup helps with this too: you know where everything is.

If today you have a single copy of everything, start with the external drive. Plug it in tonight and let it make the first copy while you sleep.