What backup program should I use?
Hi, everyone, I'm Leo Notenboom for askleo.com where I've
been talking about backups since 2003 and yes, it is something I talk about a lot.
I talk about often because it is so critically important.
And indeed one of the most common
questions I get is, well, great, what should I do?
How do I back up, what program should I
use? Well, my most common answer to pretty much any question is
it depends it depends a lot on exactly what you want to accomplish and how
confident you are that you can recover from various types of failures.
I liken it to an exercise program.
The best exercise program
or the best backup is whichever one you will actually do.
All right.
It doesn't matter that this other one might be better if you never do it.
It's more important that you do something that is good enough.
Then you try to do something else
that supposedly is better that you never actually follow through on.
So I want to focus on that.
I want to make sure that whatever backup
solution you choose, it's something you'll actually follow through on,
because if you don't follow through, it's like having no backup at all.
The first question is, do you want to put a lot of thought into it?
If not, and admittedly, a lot of people don't,
then my recommendation is actually very simple.
Get yourself an external hard drive that has at least as much capacity as your
internal hard drive, ideally maybe three or four times.
And that's not that hard to do these days.
Get yourself a good backup program like
Macrium Reflect or EaseUS ToDo and configure that program to take
a monthly full image backup and a daily incremental backup.
And you're done.
Seriously, you're done.
That is a backup solution that works for 80 percent of people.
And I suspect that it is one of those
scenarios where it will solve 99% of the issues that you might have.
It does require some work.
It does require a purchase or two.
But it's the safety net that everybody's looking for.
And it's what I fundamentally recommend
for anybody not wanting to put any more thought into this.
Now, let's say you're prepared to make a few more decisions.
OK, ask yourself this.
Am I comfortable reinstalling my system? By that I mean,
are you OK? Should something bad happen in needing to reinstall Windows
from scratch and reinstall all of your applications from scratch?
If so, you may only need to back up your data.
In fact, you may only need to have your data stored in like one drive or some
other kind of online backup service so that it's automatically backed up.
And if disaster strikes, be it malware,
be it a hardware failure, you know that after something has been
repaired, it's your responsibility to then reinstall Windows,
reinstall your applications and then copy your data from its backups.
That's actually a little less work day to day.
Simply having all of your data in a one drive folder basically does it.
It automatically backs up as long as you're connected to the Internet.
It's a nice, nice solution with a cost should disaster happen.
Another question, is there another machine nearby?
If there is, you may not need to get
an external hard drive if you're at all comfortable setting up windows networking,
which can be a pain, but once you get it set up,
it is very possible for the backups we talked about with a tool like
Macrium Reflect or EaseUS ToDo of one machine to get stored on the other and vice versa.
That way there's no additional purchase required.
If you've got lots of additional hard disk space on those other machines, then great,
why not use that to be the backup for each other?
Another question.
A lot of people don't think about this one.
How valuable is what you're doing?
Does it need to be backed up?
Many people believe that what they have isn't valuable.
I'm here to tell you, it probably is.
If you're not certain, it probably is.
It's pretty easy for us to identify the things that are really important,
like our financial records and our other databases of of personal information.
But when you think about it, we do so much with our machines these days
and so much of it is stored on the machine or in the cloud or.
Wherever there are so many things that can go wrong, just think about what happens if
you were to lose it all, what would you really miss?
Well, it might turn out that something you
care about is more important than you think.
Might online backups be an option?
There are two approaches to this.
One is the previously mentioned one drive
or Dropbox or Box.com solution, where you simply put your data in a folder
and that folder is magically backed up in more or less real time.
Even though these are generally online cloud services intended more for sharing,
they are wonderful for near real time backup of your data files.
Another approach is what's truly a backup program that simply backs up to the cloud.
It runs once a day or once a night or
whenever, and then backs up those things that have changed to cloud storage.
The similarity is that it's all backing up to cloud storage.
A dedicated backup program might backup more like your installed programs.
Or if you've got a very fast Internet connection, you can actually use one
of those programs to back up your entire machine.
It's generally unrealistic.
You do need a very high speed connection
capable of uploading a lot of data very quickly.
But if you've got that situation,
then yes, you could in fact upload or backup your entire machine to the cloud.
Most people cannot.
How important is incremental access?
This is another one that a lot of people don't think about.
If you've got a file and it's a file that changes every day, maybe it's a log,
maybe it's a cookbook, maybe it's whatever it's unique to you.
What happens if you suddenly realize
that not only is today's version wrong or gone, so was yesterday's and the day
before. You actually need the one from three days ago or five days ago?
Well, many backup solutions only save the most
recent version of the files that you're backing up.
The incremental backup solution that I
mentioned at the very beginning is something that will backup every day's
version separately so that for the most recent month, you may be able to go back
to an arbitrary day and pick up an arbitrary file as it was on that day.
If that's important to you, then yes,
you'll want to use a strategy that enables that.
If that's not important, then sure.
Just backing up the most recent copies of your files every night or something
like that might very well be enough of a solution for you.
What resources should I back up?
We tend to talk about one computer, but in reality these days especially,
we all have multiple computers and mobile devices and more.
Make sure that whatever you're thinking
about backing up encompasses everything that's important to you.
Again, your mobile device, your laptop,
your desktop, whatever else contains the data that you don't want to lose.
I mentioned it earlier,
but I do want to walk through my generally recommended approach, that is.
For every computer you have, desktop and laptop
equipped with an external drive, it should be at least four times as large
as the internal hard drive, or at least four times as large as
the amount of data on your internal hard drive,
install an imaging backup program like Macrium Reflect or EaseUS ToDo
the free versions will do the paid versions will be more flexible.
Configure that program to take monthly
full image backups and daily incremental backups.
Discard backups older than two months.
Some of the programs will actually do this
automatically for you and then finally install a data sharing
program like Dropbox or OneDrive or similar so that you're actually backing up
the data files as you work on them in near real time.
As I said, this is an 80 percent solution that will work for most people.
It's actually extremely close to what I do myself.
And if you do nothing else,
simply doing this will protect you from hardware failure, from malware,
from any number of things that can possibly go wrong with your machine.
It's something that I so strongly recommend you do.
I really encourage you to do something
to backup your valuable data and your computer
for updates, for related links.
For the article on which this video was based, visit
askleo.com/1894.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.