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guides › backups<br>guide<br>never lose your stuff again<br>Spill coffee on your laptop today and you should lose nothing. Here's how to set up automatic, off-site backups for free — not by learning to code, but by telling an AI assistant to do it for you. About twenty minutes once, then you never think about it again.<br>June 17, 2026 20 minute setup backups
A friend of mine spilled a glass of water on her laptop last night. Keys stopped working. She spent the next hour frantically dragging files into iCloud, hoping she'd grabbed the important ones before the machine died.<br>She hadn't done backups. Almost nobody has — not because they're careless, but because every backup tutorial assumes you enjoy reading about "cron jobs" and "S3 buckets." You don't. You just don't want to lose your photos.<br>Here's the thing that's changed: you no longer have to understand any of that. You can install a free AI assistant that lives in your computer's terminal, tell it "set up automatic backups of my important folders to free cloud storage," and it does the technical part — installs the tools, writes the config, schedules it to run every day. You stay in plain English the whole time.<br>This guide walks you through it once. Be honest with yourself about the time: it's roughly twenty-five minutes of one-time setup , and a few of those minutes are clicking through a couple of free signups. After that, it runs itself forever and you can forget it exists.<br>What this costs<br>The backup itself$0. We use Cloudflare R2, which gives everyone 10 GB of free storage with no fees for getting your data back out. The AI assistant$0 if you don't already pay for one (we'll use Google's Gemini CLI, free with a Google account). If you already pay for ChatGPT or Claude, you'll use what you've got — no new cost either way. Failure alerts$0 — a free monitor emails you if a backup ever stops running. Your time~25 minutes, once. What you need to knowHow to copy and paste. That's the whole list.<br>The honest catch: 10 GB of free storage is plenty for documents and the photos you'd cry over, but it is not enough to back up your entire computer. That's fine — most of what's on a computer (apps, system files, downloads you could grab again) doesn't need backing up. Step 3 is about picking the stuff that actually matters, and your AI helper does the picking with you.
First, tell us your setup<br>(Pick your computer and your AI. The steps below rewrite themselves to match.)<br>OS: Mac Windows<br>AI: I pay for ChatGPT I pay for Claude Neither — free<br>Pick your computer and your AI above to see your exact steps.
This guide tailors its steps to your computer and AI — please enable JavaScript to see the exact commands for your setup.<br>You picked the free route. Good — everything from here is $0. We'll use Gemini CLI , Google's free AI assistant.
You already pay for ChatGPT, so we'll use Codex CLI , OpenAI's terminal assistant that comes with your plan. Nothing extra to buy.
You already pay for Claude, so we'll use Claude Code , Anthropic's terminal assistant that comes with your plan. Nothing extra to buy.
Step 1 — Install your AI helper<br>This all happens in the Terminal , a plain text window where you type instructions to your computer. Don't worry, you'll only paste a couple of lines.<br>Open the Terminal: press Cmd + Space, type Terminal, hit Enter. A window opens. That's it.
Open the Terminal: click Start, type Terminal (or PowerShell), hit Enter. A blue window opens. That's it.
Gemini CLI needs a free helper called Node.js first (it's just plumbing — install it once and forget it).<br>Go to nodejs.org , download the "LTS" version, open the file, and click through the installer (Continue → Continue → Install).<br>Back in Terminal, paste this and press Enter:<br>Copy npm install -g @google/gemini-cli<br>Now start it by typing:<br>Copy gemini<br>The first time, it opens your browser and asks you to sign in with your Google account . Do that, and you're connected — free.
Gemini CLI needs a free helper called Node.js first (it's just plumbing — install it once and forget it).<br>Go to nodejs.org , download the "LTS" version, open the file, and click through the installer (Next → Next → Install).<br>Back in your Terminal window, paste this and press Enter:<br>Copy npm install -g @google/gemini-cli<br>Now start it by typing:<br>Copy gemini<br>The first time, it opens your browser and asks you to sign in with your Google account . Do that, and you're connected — free.
What you just got: Gemini CLI's free tier covers 1,000 requests a day — far more than a backup setup needs. You won't hit a paywall doing this.
Claude Code has a one-line installer — no Node.js, no fuss.<br>Paste this into Terminal and press Enter:<br>Copy curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash<br>Start it by typing:<br>Copy claude<br>Sign in with your Claude account when prompted.
Claude Code has a one-line installer — no Node.js, no fuss.<br>Paste this into your PowerShell/Terminal window and...