Don’t Back Up Wrong: SD Card, USB Stick, SSD or HDD?

Back Up Smarter: What to Use — and What to Avoid

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Making a Backup on right device

A while back, someone asked me a deceptively simple question that really got me thinking:

“Since you can buy a 256GB SD card for like 25 bucks, wouldn’t that be a cheap and easy way to back up my laptop? I hate plugging in an external drive. With an SD card, I could automate everything and forget about it.”

SD card Plugged in

On the surface, it sounds like a clever hack — cheap, tiny, always plugged in, hands-off backups. But honestly? This feels like a really bad idea.

Let me explain why. And along the way, I’ll share what I do use for backups — and what’s saved my digital life more than once.

SD Card: The Illusion of “Lifetime Warranty”

Let’s get one thing out of the way first:

a lifetime warranty doesn’t mean…