Online Safety · 6 min read
How to Protect Personal Files From Ransomware
Photographs, documents and records cannot be re-downloaded. Protecting them is a backup discipline problem with an antivirus layer on top, not the other way round.
Published 2026-08-09 · Last updated 2026-08-09
The 3-2-1 rule, simplified
Three copies of anything you care about, on two different kinds of storage, with one copy off-site or offline. For a household that usually means: the PC, an external drive you unplug, and a cloud service with version history.
Version history is the ransomware-specific part
A sync service that faithfully mirrors your files will faithfully mirror the encrypted versions too. What saves you is the ability to roll a folder back to a point in time. OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox and Backblaze all offer this — confirm the retention window on your plan.
Lock the folders down
Enable controlled folder access in Windows Security and add any non-standard document locations to the protected list. Expect a few prompts in the first week as legitimate applications request access; approve them individually rather than turning the feature off.
Test the restore
Once, deliberately, restore a folder from your backup to a different location and open the files. An untested backup has roughly the reliability of no backup at all.
Frequently asked questions
- Is cloud sync a backup?
- Only with version history. Plain sync propagates encryption and deletion to every device.
- Will an external drive protect me?
- Only if it is disconnected when not in use. A permanently attached drive is just another mounted volume to ransomware.