One day you're going to turn on your computer and... nothing. It's dead. It happens to us all eventually,
and when it does you'd better hope you've got a backup. That, or you'll get hit by ransomware,
or your data will corrupt, or your computer will get stolen, or you'll just delete the
wrong thing by accident. It happens. That's why we make backups. In this video I'll show you how.
Welcome back to The Pro Tech Show. In this channel I tend to cover content that's aimed at
IT Professionals, however some videos like this are more aimed at home users or people who are trying
to run a small business. People who don't have the luxury of an IT department looking after them.
There are actually two different backup solutions built right into Windows 10. I'm going to show you
how to use those because you've already got them Then I'm going to show you a third-party solution
that I use because it's really good, but rest assured that none of these will cost you a penny.
Well... not for the tool itself, but you do need to have somewhere to put the backup, of course. Before
I do that, let me first fire over a couple of warnings. Some computers come with a pre-installed
backup program that backs up your computer to somewhere else on your computer. That's not a
backup! Backing up your computer to your computer is pointless because if it breaks you lose the
backup as well. The other thing that doesn't count as a backup (and this is more for the technically
minded people) is RAID. RAID is for redundancy. It's not a backup! I've seen people make that mistake.
If your file gets corrupted, encrypted, or deleted with RAID; it's corrupted, encrypted, or deleted
across the whole array and you can't recover. Not. A. Backup! One of the first things you'll need to
think about is where you're going to store your backups. The most common options are going to be
a USB hard drive or cloud storage like OneDrive. I'm going to demonstrate this using a USB drive
because that's usually the most cost effective, and unless you've got a good internet connection or
you don't have very much data a cloud backup could take a very long time to create or recover from.
Backing up all my personal data to the cloud would literally take months over this connection,
which is the best available to me. Uploading these videos is bad enough! There's definitely something
to be said for having both in case the building burns down, but let's keep it simple for now.
So what backups can you do with Windows 10? If you go to "Backup settings" in your Start menu,
or open the settings app and choose "Update & Security" then "Backup", you arrive at some settings
for File History. If you click the button to add a drive and select your USB drive you're done;
but what did it do? If you click "More options" you can see what folders are being backed up, and how
often. It's important to realise this File History backup is not backing up your entire computer.
It's backing up the folders listed here and that's it. You can add more, but if it's not in the list
it's not backed up. You'll notice that by default it will back up your files every hour. This assumes
that you're leaving your backup drive plugged in all the time so it can run backups all the time.
You should not do that. Bad File History! If you're using a USB drive, especially if you're using the
same drive every time, then when it's plugged into your computer the backups are vulnerable.
If your computer gets ransomwared and you've left the USB drive plugged in for File History
then your File History is going to get ransomwared too, and now you've no way to recover.
My advice is to run a backup then unplug the drive. Only plug it in when you want to take a new
backup. You do not want something destroying your live data and your backups at the same
time. File History is a pretty simple affair. If you look at the drive it's just literally
copying the selected folders over to the drive. You can browse through them if you want. You
could restore them by copy-pasting them back, but there is a built-in tool for that as well.
If you scroll down in the "Back-up options" page you'll find a link at the bottom,
or you can find it in your start menu. If you type "restore" or "file history" it will usually show up.
Use the left and right arrows at the bottom to browse between restore points, navigate to the
file or folder you want to recover, and hit the green button in the middle to copy them back.
File History is nice and simple, but I'm not a fan. It's too limited for me. It's useful
if you've made a mistake and lost a file, but it's not so useful for recovering from
something catastrophic like hardware failure or a bad update that completely wrecked Windows. In
that scenario you'll have to reinstall or reset Windows to scratch, you may need to download and
reinstall your drivers, you'll need to reinstall your programs, and then configure all of your
settings in Windows, and in all of your programs from scratch... then you can restore your files.
Who has time for that? In fairness, as long as you selected the right files to back up then at least
you can recover using File History. The rest can be recreated as long as you have a copy
of your files, but it's going to be a pain in the backside. If my computer gets hit by ransomware I
don't want to spend ages cleaning it up and really, really hope I got every last bit of it before
plugging in my precious, vulnerable backup drive.Ii want to nuke that thing dead and have it go right
back to the way it was before anything went wrong. That's what the old backup tool in Windows did.
If you go back to your backup settings and scroll down a bit you'll see this question:
"Looking for an older backup?". Click the link to go to Backup and Restore (Windows 7).
Despite the name, this works perfectly well with Windows 10. Microsoft don't want you
to use this, and they may well remove it in the future, but you know what? I like this one better.
Unlike file history, this Windows 7 backup creates a system image of your computer. That's one big
file that captures everything in its exact state, allowing you to restore the entire computer from
scratch exactly as it was. In Microsoft's defence, there are benefits to the File History approach.
It's easier to use and it takes up way less space. File History only backs up your important files
whereas this backs up literally everything. If you have 250 GB of Call of Duty installed this is
going to back that up, too. Now personally I would want it to. I don't want to download and reinstall
that. I don't want to install and reconfigure all of my programs from scratch. I want to hit the restore
button, get a cup of tea, and come back to find my computer as it was before everything went wrong.
Yes, it's slower. Yes, it takes up more space; but when something goes wrong I just want a button to
click to make it all better again, and that's what an image backup gives you. Here's how you use it.
Click "Set up back-up", pick your USB drive, choose your options. You can use this
just to back up selected folders, not create an image, but then you should just use File
History. I'm going to choose my own settings and just select the option for a system image.
Now I've seen a lot of people who when comparing this with the File History tool have said the
Windows 7 backup won't let you restore individual files. That's just plain wrong. You saw the option
right there to choose individual folders. If I'd selected that you'd get an option to choose and
restore those files, just like with File History. I didn't select it for a reason
that will become clear later. In the meantime, how do we restore our backup? It says I haven't got any.
In this interface you can only restore individual files - not an entire system image.
I only selected the system image option if you remember, so
how do I use that? Well, remember the system image is used to nuke Windows and start over.
You can't do that from inside Windows. You'll need to boot to the Windows Recovery Environment.
If your computer is working at this point you can do that by holding shift while you click restart,
then click "Troubleshoot", then "Advanced options".
Finally click "See more recovery options" and "System Image Recovery".
If your computer is dead at this point and you can't get into Windows to do this,
you'll need to boot it from a DVD or USB drive that you've downloaded the Windows installer to.
Reboot using the Windows install media, then the process is quite similar.
Let's select our language, and before you click "Install now" as you would normally do,
notice a little "Repair your computer" link down here. Click it, and now we're going to select
the "Troubleshoot" option. From here you'll see "System Image Recovery". However you get to this,
the latest image is the default option or you can select an older backup if you prefer.
Then I'll click my way through and click "Finish" to start the process. You may need the options to
format and re-partition the disk if you're restoring over the top of a different hard
drive than the one you've backed up. You shouldn't need to install drivers for a USB hard drive, but
if you've backed up to network location instead and Windows doesn't recognise your adapter inside
this environment, you might need to feed it some drivers. One last warning here: this is a system
image so it backs up everything, and it overwrites everything. That's what I want so "yes". This isn't
restoring a single file like File History so it's going to take a while. Time to fast forward.
Once it's done it's going to reboot you back into Windows and you're back to where
everything was at the time of your backup. All your programs, all your settings, everything.
Now, I told you there was a reason I didn't back up individual files as well, and now I'm going
to tell you what that is. People who say you can't restore individual files with this tool
have clearly just never used it, but something you may not know is that if you create a system image
you can actually restore any file that's contained within that image. It's not as straightforward as
if you specifically selected them but this has saved me before, so I'm going to show you how.
If we go to our backup drive we see the WindowsImageBackup folder.
The first folder inside this is the name of our computer. If you go into that we'll find a backup
folder with the date of our backup. Inside this we see a bunch of files. The ones to pay attention to are
the ones with the hard drive icon. Each of these files is an image of a partition on your disk,
and you can open them up and poke about inside. Let's go to disk management and take a look.
If I select "Attach VHD" from the "Action" menu and select the biggest image file from our backup
folder you will see that it appears here as an extra disk. If I right-click and "Change Drive
Letter and Paths" I can give this a drive letter; at which point it appears as a hard drive in my
computer and I can browse the contents of the backup file. So you don't actually need to make
a separate backup of individual files at all - you can browse the image directly. Just... you know... don't
make any changes to it. It's your backup, after all. Right-click on it, "Detach VHD", and you're done.
If you found that tip useful, hit the like button, and while you're down there the subscribe
button isn't far away, either. I prefer the old system image to the new File History because
I am happy to trade the extra storage space for the ability to simply nuke and recover if anything
goes wrong. It has been deprecated though, meaning Microsoft may simply remove it in a future update.
I don't actually use it. I use a third-party tool called Veaam. if you work in IT, Veeam will
need no introduction. If you're a home user, you've probably never heard of it.
Veeam is used extensively in businesses to make large-scale backups of entire networks. I have
used it for a long time and it has never let me down. For a backup product, the one metric that matters
above all else is reliability. Veeam haven't sponsored this video, but they probably should have.
Hey... I don't suppose I can ask about that respectively, can I? Anyway, we're not using Veaam
to back up a massive network here, but fortunately they do have a standalone backup tool that you
can use for free. I'll drop a link in the video description. Let's get that installed. Tick two
boxes, click install, done. Now Veeam is asking for a USB drive to configure a default backup.
I'm going to skip that because something the eagle-eyed among you might have noticed is that
my USB backup drive in this demo computer is not a USB drive at all. It's a local disk. The reason
is simply that this is a virtual machine in Hyper-V and Hyper-V won't let me pass through USB devices.
Come on, Microsoft! Catch up, will you? You will also get prompted to create recovery media. You
should do this. I recommend writing it to a USB thumb drive that you keep with your backup disk. This is
because Veeam creates system images like the last tool, so if your computer is completely dead you
can use it to restore from scratch. You do need something to boot from to do that, though; and the
Windows install media won't understand Veeam backup files so Veeam creates its own customised Windows
recovery media, here. I don't have the option to write to USB because Hyper-V, but I can create
an image file that I could burn to a DVD later. A handy option Veeam has is to include drivers and
network settings from the computer, and embed them in the image. If you have any devices the Windows
Recovery Environment doesn't recognise, this avoids the need to have to hunt around for the drivers
like you would have with a previous Windows tool. I'm going to skip that for now because
I've already got recovery media. Let's launch Veeam. We don't want to install a licence because we're
using the free version. We need to set up a backup job because I skipped the wizard so
click on the menu here and add a new job. Normally you'd probably want to select the entire computer.
I don't because, remember, my backup drive in this demo PC is actually a local drive; and I don't
want to back up my backup drive to my backup drive. That would be silly. I'm going to select
"Volume level backup" instead. You could just select individual files, but as we've already established,
I like full system images. I'm going to exclude the backup drive and move on to pick my backup target.
"Local storage" is the option you want for a USB drive. "Shared folder" is for a network location.
"Veeam backup repository" is to back up to a Veaam server, which if you're watching this video you
probably don't have at home. OneDrive is pretty self-explanatory. Here's where you choose the
schedule, and here are a couple of options I like for a USB drive. Rather than back ip at fixed times, if
I choose these two options Veeam will automatically start a backup when I plug in my USB drive.
It will then eject the drive from Windows when it's done to minimise your risk window.
It doesn't get much simpler - plug it in to start a backup, unplug it when done. You don't even need to
do the safe removal option because Veeam did it for you. I'm going to tick this box and run a backup
now, and fast forward to the end. My backup is done. Now, let's take a look at our recovery options.
I can start a recovery by clicking on the backup in the main window, by right-clicking on the system
tray icon, or from the Start menu. In any case I have file level or volume restore options. Volume
lets me restore an entire drive image, and the file level lets me restore individual files. If I select
the latter option it opens a backup browser that lets me navigate the backup and choose what to restore.
Let's say we want to restore the entire computer from scratch, though.
For that we need to boot from the recovery media that we created earlier (that I actually skipped).
This actually has a lot of the same tools as the Windows media as they're both based on the Windows
Recovery Environment. The option we want is "Bare Metal Recovery". It's found my backup already because
my drive is already attached, so I'm going to click through and select my recovery point.
Again, you may need to change a few options and select partitions if you're restoring to a
different computer than the one you're backing up. I'm going to do the entire computer, and we're off.
All done, and we can reboot back to our fully recovered Windows. So there you have it. You have
two options built right into Windows, but if you're after my personal recommendation it's Veeam all
the way. Touch wood, it has yet to let me down and that's across thousands of systems. All right, I'm
going leave it there for now. Let us know in the comments which backup tool you're using, and if you
found this video useful then don't forget to like and subscribe. There are a couple more videos for
you over here. If you're new here then... well, you're still here so you might have likeed my content, in which
case you should probably click one of those. Unless of course you just left this running and you've
gone to the toilet, in which case... don't forget to flush! Thanks for watching, guys. See you next time!