Backups are your recovery plan for ransomware, hardware failure, accidental deletion, theft, and fire or flood. Without them, any of these events causes permanent, total data loss. With a good backup strategy, any of these events is recoverable — an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe.
Cloud sync services — Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud — are not backups. They are synchronization: changes on your device propagate to the cloud in real time. When ransomware encrypts your files, those encrypted versions sync to the cloud, overwriting your good copies within minutes. A true backup captures a point-in-time snapshot that sync cannot overwrite.
An offline backup — a drive that is physically disconnected from your computer after the backup completes — is immune to ransomware. The malware cannot encrypt a drive it cannot reach. This is the gold-standard defense against ransomware for individuals and the primary reason large organizations keep tape backups in physically separate locations.
Test your backups. A backup you have never tried to restore from is an untested assumption. At least once a year, go through the process of restoring a file or folder from each backup to confirm the process works and the data is intact. Silent corruption, misconfigured settings, or expired subscriptions can silently invalidate a backup you rely on.