How do I back up my computer?
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com with probably one of the most common
questions I get asked and probably one of the topics that I've covered the most
on AskLeo.com. To start with, what does it mean to back up?
Well, backing up, honestly,
is nothing more than making a copy of your data or a copy of whatever it is you're
afraid of losing and then keeping that copy in a safe place.
The rule of thumb is that if it's in only one place, it's not backed up.
A great way to understand whether or not you're in that situation is to imagine
your computer's hard drive dying instantly and without warning.
Would you lose data?
If you would lose data by that hard drive
failing on you, then you haven't backed up.
You do not have backup copies
of the important stuff that you want to keep track of.
So backing up is what you need to do
to protect yourself from that situation and, as it turns out, many others.
Now, there are two classes of backing up.
One is copying your data.
By that I mean your documents, your pictures, or whatever.
You simply make sure that in addition
to wherever they happen to be, say, on your computer,
there's another copy on an external hard drive in the cloud on another computer.
Where else?
It doesn't really matter as long as there's multiple copies, more than one.
The other is what's called imaging your system.
The assumption we make in the first one, copying your data, is that we understand
what's important to copy and we copy it all.
Imaging your system removes that assumption.
It basically says,
I don't know what's important, so we're going to take everything.
A system image is an image of everything
that's on your hard disk, then copied to another location.
It's generally the approach that I prefer and recommend.
It's also useful for system situations
where, say, your hard disk does die, because then you can simply replace
the image on the replacement hard drive and you're back where you left off.
But the bottom line for both of these kinds of backups is simple.
The backup creates a copy of the data, and that copy is stored somewhere else.
So where should somewhere else be?
Well, there's no simple answer for that because there are many answers to that.
But each answer has characteristics about how much it actually protects you from.
A rule of thumb is that the further away
your backup copy is from the original, the more things you're protected from.
For example, if you copy your documents
to a different folder on the same hard drive, you're protected from a few things,
like accidentally deleting the file or making changes you didn't expect to.
But if that hard drive dies, you've lost both your original and your backup.
If you've got a second hard drive in your
computer, then if you copy your files to the second hard drive.
Then again, if that main hard drive dies,
you've still got the files on the second hard drive.
But if a failure happens with your entire
computer, like the power supply shorts out both drives, you've lost everything.
If you copy things to an external hard
drive, which is generally one of the things that I recommend,
then everything that is in your computer could basically go away but you would
still have everything on your external hard drive.
There are failures that can affect both,
but it's rare that that scenario is actually pretty rare.
But what's nice about this is that you've got everything either on your computer
directly on its internal hard drives or you've got the external hard drives.
Now, there are still things that that doesn't protect you from.
For example, malware could potentially run
through all of your drives, internal or external, and do things to them.
If your backup is on a different computer
on the same network, you're protected from a little bit more.
Now, there's still malware that could
potentially migrate across your network, but the kinds of things that might happen
on one computer generally don't affect another computer that directly.
So your data is again a little further away, but also a little safer.
And then, of course,
if the location is somewhere else completely,
like the cloud or another house or your place of employment,
you take things to work or whatever, then things are protected from even more
disastrous scenarios like your house burning down and taking your computers
and your external drives and everything with it.
So again, the closer your backup is
to the original, the greater you could lose everything at once.
It doesn't happen often, but it can.
A great overall strategy is what's often referred to as a three to one approach.
Three copies in two different formats with one copy kept offsite.
So, for example, I might back up my documents
to my external drive and I might back them up to the cloud.
Now, I'm protected from a lot.
So to flip that around,
a three step backup plan that I recommend is one get an external hard drive.
Two, get backup software that you can then configure to save your information
regularly, ideally a system image to that external drive on a regular basis.
And then three, back up your data online
using something like OneDrive or Dropbox or any of the other utilities.
What's critical here is that backing up is
in fact your responsibility to avoid the potential for data loss.
However, it can sound really confusing.
It doesn't have to be, as long as you can keep in mind a few
simple principles like external drives and cloud storage.
For comments, for updates,
for related links and more, visit AskLeo.com/6643
I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is AskLeo.com. Thanks for watching.