Which hard drive?

[Willowskyblue]

I need to back up my MacBook air and don't have a clue which portable hard drive I need. Can anyone recommend one please? I don't need much storage as my laptop is 16gb and there isn't much on it. There's an issue with it though and they have advised to back it up.

Are you sure 16gb is correct? That seems awfully small for storage. I think 16gb might be the size of the memory?
Storage is more likely to be 512gb as an absolute minimum.
In terms of a back up hard drive any usb drive which is at least the size of your internal storage drive should work - well known brands like WD, Seagate, Toshiba, Samsung should be reliable.
What is it exactly you want to back up? If not very much, You might find it easier to backup the files to cloud storage, like icloud or Google drive.

Thanks @GanttChart you’re right, that’s memory. Thanks for the info - that’s really helpful.

Assuming it's a recent MacBook Air with 512GB internal storage, and USB C ports, I would recommend either

Lacie 512GB SSD. (£148, but very fast, and no moving parts, (SSD rather than a hard drive)

Any Cheapo Drive (£27, slower but mechanical so more likely to fail, especially if dropped.

Regardless I would recommend enabling iCloud, so that it backs up everything without interaction, and can be accessed via the web should you not have access to your MacBook.

I use iCloud to keep my three devices in sync, but I do back up my Photo Library to a separate device every year (if I remember).

Thanks @Dbank very helpful.