Back up your computer! If your hard drive fails or you have a malware attack you can breathe a sigh of relief and know everything will be just fine if you backup. But what should you back up? Let’s start off by looking at what exactly needs to be backed up: personal files like home videos, photos, your music collection, and important documents that would be difficult or impossible to replace. Personal files should be backed up often. You can also backup your operating system, programs, and other settings if you’d like. These can be backups can then be recalled, but having a more comprehensive or even full system backup will save you some time in the event of a computer emergency.

Ways to backup your system
There’s a few different ways to backup your system and they can be either online or local. I recommend you have at least three copies of all important files - the original, the backup, and the backup’s backup. A combo of local and online access to files will protect you from 99% of potential data loss.

Local Disk Backup with File History and Time Machine
A local or onsite backup is one kept physically at your location, like backing up to an external hard drive. It’s faster, easier and much more secure, provided that the physical drive remains intact and in your possession. Windows provides a simple solution to backup your data called Windows Backup and Restore in Windows 7 or File History in Windows 10. First, make sure you have an external drive that is the same size or larger than the internal drive you are going to backup. Keep in mind, SSDs will be faster and last longer than traditional hard drives. Then, type the word ‘backup’ in your search bar, and choose backup settings. At the top of the screen you’ll see Backup using File History and you can use the plus button to tell your PC which drive you’d like everything backed up to. You can then customize the backup to take place as often as you like. For my Mac friends out there, you can go to System Preferences -- Time Machine and choose your backup disk. You can then set it to run hourly updates and make a copy of any changes to your chosen hard drive. This is an extremely simple method, but note that it keeps backups until your hard drive runs out of space, after that, it will rewrite the oldest data so you may have a difficult time if you need to access a backup from further than a few months ago.

Offsite Backups
An offsite backup is anytime your files are stored somewhere other than your current system location. Technically this could be a hard drive you keep at a friend’s house, but more often it means backing up your system online. Dropbox, Google Drive iCloud, and OneDrive are convenient, low-cost options that have sync options to automatically sync your most important files. Depending how much data you want to back up, you may need to purchase a data plan. You can use your chosen storage platform’s software to set your preferences. As long as you are connected to the Internet, your data will be backed up according to your settings.

Disk Images
A more comprehensive and secure way to backup your entire system is to use a disk image or ghost image. You will need specific software to do this. There are free options like Macrium Reflect and EasUS Disk Copy for hard drives 1TB or smaller, and paid options like Acronis True Image out there. If this sounds like something you need, as always do research, read reviews and find the right backup and recovery software for you. On the Mac side you can use the Disk Utility app to make a disk image.

How many of you actually backup your computer regularly? Do you have a ‘forgot to backup’ disaster story that you’d like to share? Please share it in the comments.

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