Backing up computer files

I'm one of those blinky flashy dancing Christmas light guys. I've been working on sequencing songs for my Christmas display for this year. I visit a couple different message boards to help with different parts of the display. Anyway, today two of my main contacts lost all of their files. Let me tell you, that's a lot of time and effort lost. It typically takes about 8-10 hours to sequence a single two minute song.

To the point, I need to backup my files on my laptop. It's a cheap refurbished Dell laptop I bought for about $100 at Best Buy.

Recommendations on an external hard drive/storage?

I have not had any issues with Western Digital external drives, mine are older but have a 1 TB and a 3 TB model that are desktop externals, the 1 TB backed up my old windows 7 desktop and the 3 TB is where I stored a bunch of video mostly semipro football games.

I switched to Mac and still use those to pull up my old files. I now have a 1 TB portable WD that is small like a deck of cards using as a backup for my MacBook Pro

I store my data in the cloud (Dropbox) so that it is available for recovery and for use on any device that I have (desktop, phone, iPad, etc.).

My IT guy told me to get the 1TB sea gate ultra slim. It was around $100. Works fine. I'll never eat up that much space.

And thanks for the reminder. Time to back it up.

I have a Seagate 1TB network hard drive with a 500gb Seagate drive plugged into that. I can access the drive from any computer in my house, or access it remotely from the web. I've also got several small portable drives that I use, as well as a dropbox, One Drive, and Google drive accounts that I use for various personal and work related things. I probably need to work on consolidating and getting rid of some of this storage, although keeping some redundancy is a good idea.