My entire backup strategy is a $70 external drive and two scheduled commands

Published Aug 15, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT Korbin is a Linux system administrator who spends most of his time in a terminal figuring out how things actually work. Over the last decade he's written hundreds of articles about Linux configuration, troubleshooting weird problems, and using open-source tools in the real world. He also works a lot with Windows systems and networking, especially in mixed environments where things don't always behave the way the documentation says they should. Writing things down is how he makes sense of it all and hopefully saves someone else a few hours. Many of the most popular backup solutions require a hefty purchase and a more involved setup, like a NAS decked out with multiple drives plus a cloud subscription for extra storage. There's nothing wrong with that strategy, but it's not the easiest way to do it, and it costs more than it has to. My whole backup strategy is a portable hard drive that costs under $70 and two rsync commands that run on a schedule. Together they satisfy the 3-2-1 rule: my working copy, another local copy on the external drive, and an offsite copy sitting on a rented storage VPS. The whole setup is incredibly simple, with no GUI, specialized software, or cloud subscription. It's been running that way for several years, and I've successfully restored from it twice. Backups don't have to be that complicated. The entire configuration is a few lines of plain text, yet it's equally effective as an advanced backup suite. A portable HDD works great for a local copy It costs way less than a few months of cloud storage A 1TB portable hard drive is easy to find for around $70. I picked mine up for about half that, but that was before the recent drive shortage caused by AI's popularity. If that's more than you'd like to spend, an old laptop drive in a cheap USB 3.0 enclosure is basically the same product. Even a slow 5400 RPM disk works fine for daily backups. I keep everything that's worth backing up in a single folder. Everything else, including the OS and installed apps, is replaceable. Here's the first command I use, which sends my directory of important files over to the portable hard drive: rsync -av --delete /mnt/c/Users/me/files/ /mnt/d/backup/ The -a option tells rsync to recurse through directories and preserve permissions, timestamps, and symlinks, while the -v flag prints an ongoing report of which file is being transferred. As for --delete, it removes files from the destination directory that no longer exist at the source. There are plenty of other options available for various scenarios you might have, like an exclude list, but these are the essential ones. I run rsync through WSL, which is why the drives are accessible under the /mnt directory in the command. In my experience, it's the best file synchronization tool available, and beats anything that Windows ships. Running WSL has a lot of perks, but access to rsync alone is enough reason to install it. The second command is equally important A cheap VPS saves me from my two local copies failing Having the first backup in the same location as my primary copy only protects me from a dead drive and little else. Things like theft and fire would still take out both copies at once. There's also a risk of ransomware hitting both drives if I plug in the portable one when my PC gets infected. That's the reason for the 3-2-1 rule, which requires that one copy be in a different geographical location entirely. My offsite copy is a rented storage VPS, which is just a Linux box with a big disk and SSH access. Rsync works over SSH natively, so the second command in my backup script looks pretty similar to the first one: rsync -avP --delete -e ssh /mnt/c/Users/me/files/ user@my-vps:/home/me/backup/ The -P flag shows current progress for each file transfer and resumes interrupted (half-transferred) files, while the -e ssh just specifies that I want to sync the files with a directory on a remote server via SSH. I have key-based authentication set up, so I don't need to type a password every time the command runs, which is essential if you plan to run it on an unattended schedule. Both of these commands are in a single Bash script that WSL's cron runs every day at 2 AM. I prefer cron to Windows' Task Scheduler, especially since rsync needs to be run from WSL anyway. A few caveats to be aware of Those two commands don't quite cover everything This isn't a complete backup solution on its own, because there's no version history. If I accidentally delete a file without realizing it, or make an undesirable change, and then my backup jobs run at 2 AM, those updates sync to my other copies. Purpose-built tools like Borg and Restic handle this properly, with version history and deduplication. They're also more intuitive to use for users who haven't spent a bunch of time with rsync in a Linux terminal. The way I address that shortcoming is with the cp -al command, which hardlinks the previous backup into a dated folder before the sync runs. Since unchanged files don't consume any additional space, I keep 30 days of restore points on the same portable backup drive. The fancier tools I mentioned above do this more elegantly, and are good alternatives for anyone who wants something with more features than rsync. Cheap and boring makes for a solid backup My backup strategy survives so easily because there's really nothing to maintain. Two commands, a cheap portable drive, and an offsite VPS let me meet all three requirements of the 3-2-1 rule without spending much money or configuring a complicated setup. The best backup strategy is the one that'll still be running years later, and this one is so simple that it easily lasts that long.