Everyone knows backing up your computer is important, but there are so many questions
and choices - how do you back up, do you need any equipment, is cloud storage as good as
a physical backup? All of these can delay you from making a start
on backing up. Well I’m going to show you how easy and quick it is to do a backup in
Windows 10, and how you can even do your first backup right now.
In my job doing tech support, there’s one phone call I get several times a month. The
customer will have turned their computer, and all they get is a black screen.
In that moment, they think of all the work they’ve got stored on their computer, all
the family photos, all the important stuff they might never see again.
One of the most heartbreaking times this happens is in the late spring or early summer, when
students phone me and tell me the dissertation they’ve been working on continually for
months has just vanished. And all too often, the client won’t have
an up-to-date backup. They’ll tell me things like they didn’t know how to get started,
what they needed to buy, or just that they’ve got a backup but it’s not up-to-date enough
to cover what they’ve lost. Now, normally I’m able to fix some problem
with the computer, switch it on again, and you usually find the data is all where they
left it, but sometimes I have to break the news that their hard drive has failed and
there’s absolutely nothing we can do to get their data back. Whatever the outcome,
I always make sure they know how to do a backup in future.
So my mission with this video is to get you to do a backup today. Ideally I’d like you
to keep backing up in future, but to be honest, if you just make one backup after watching
this video today, it could be the difference between having everything and having nothing.
CLOUD vs PHYSICAL BACKUP The first thing you need to decide is whether
you’re going to store your data on the cloud, or on a physical drive like this. If you want
to keep everything really safe, I’d recommend both, and I’m going to cover both cloud
storage and physical storage in this video. Cloud backup means using a service like Dropbox,
OneDrive or Google Drive to keep a secure copy of all your files on the Internet. To
keep things simple, I’ll be covering OneDrive, because it’s built-in to Windows 10. With
OneDrive you get 5 gigabytes of storage for free, which is plenty if you’ll just be
storing documents. However, if you’ll be storing a large photo collection, you’ll
probably want to go onto a OneDrive subscription, which I’ll be discussing later.
Above all, cloud backup is convenient, because once you’ve set it up you don’t need to
remember to do any backups in future, it’s just constantly syncing.
If you find yourself with a broken computer, all you have to do is find another computer
that works, sign in with your user name and password, and all of your data will be there
waiting for you on the cloud. Not all cloud storage works well as a backup
though, because it’s possible for your computer to get infected with something called ransomware,
and if a file on your computer becomes unreadable, the version of that file on the cloud is only
going to have the same problem. This has changed since OneDrive introduced
File Restore, which means older versions of all of your files are kept on the cloud, just
in case you need to roll back any changes. File Restore used to be a business feature
only, but it’s recently been added the version of OneDrive that’s included with Office.
Physical backups are tried and tested. You can rely on a hard drive or a memory stick,
even if your Internet connection goes down, or your broadband is too slow to upload all
of your files. And as secure as cloud services are, you can pretty much guarantee a hacker
isn’t going to get their hands on these. HOW MUCH STORAGE DO I NEED?
Whether you’re doing a cloud or a physical backup, you’ll need to know how much data
is stored on your computer. Click on the Start Menu, and type in Control
Panel. Click on the Control Panel. When the Control Panel opens, click in the
Search Box in the top right corner and search for System. Click on System, then Advanced
System Settings, then look for User Profiles. Click on Settings here. Look at each user
account you want to back up – probably just the one with your name on it. You want to
make a note of the size, because that gives you an idea of how much cloud storage, or
how large a drive, you’ll need. Data is normally measured in GB, or gigabytes.
A gigabyte is 1000 megabytes, and a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes.
Whether you’re buying cloud storage or a physical drive, make sure it’s got enough
capacity for the data you’ve got now, plus the data you’re likely to have in future.
CLOUD BACKUP First of all, let’s do a backup using OneDrive.
You don’t need to go out and buy anything, so you can do your first backup using OneDrive
right now. OneDrive is already included with Windows
10, so you don’t even need to download anything. Just open your File Explorer, and click on
OneDrive. If you’re not already signed in, it will ask you to sign in using your Microsoft
Account. If you don’t have a Microsoft Account, go to OneDrive.com and click on Sign Up For
Free. Once you’ve signed into OneDrive, you should
see a couple of folders in there, like Documents and Photos. You can create more if you like.
All you need to do now is start storing your files here instead of the existing Documents
and Photos folders. For now, we’re going to copy all of your
documents into OneDrive. So go into your existing Documents. At the top of File Explorer, you’ll
see the Home tab, and under this you should see Select All. Click Select All. Then click
Copy. Now open your OneDrive, and go into OneDrive
Documents. Click Paste. All of your documents will be copied into here.
Now you could delete everything that was in the existing Documents folder, but I don’t
want you to delete anything until you’re completely comfortable with how everything
is stored. Now you can go into your existing Photos,
select everything you see, and click Copy. Then go into the OneDrive Photos folder, and
click Paste.
From now on, when you create a new document or take some new photos, make sure you store
them in your OneDrive folders. Then they’ll always be backed up.
You can check the status of your OneDrive by looking at its icon down in the Notification
Area. Here we can see this spinning arrow symbol, which tells us that OneDrive is processing
all the files we just added to it. There’s a setting in OneDrive that we probably
want to turn off. Let’s have a look at it. Right-click on the OneDrive icon, then go
to Settings. Under the Settings tab, look for Files on Demand. What does this do? It
frees up some space on your hard drive by keeping your files purely in OneDrive and
not on the computer. It means that if you want to work on a file you haven’t used
in a while, you’ll need an Internet connection to download it first. This might be a nice
idea if your computer has limited space on the hard drive, but if you have a big hard
drive you should keep it unticked. Eventually you might store so much on OneDrive
that you run out of the 5 gigabyte allowance they give you for free. At that point, it’s
time to think about paying for a subscription to OneDrive, and you can find the pricing
plans on the OneDrive website. I think you get the best value with the plans that include
Microsoft Office. PHYSICAL BACKUP
Now we’re going to look at how to backup all our files onto a physical device.
We’ve just got to decide whether to buy a memory stick like this, or a hard drive
like this. If your files don’t take up much space,
say 20 gigabytes or less, you probably want to go with a memory stick. Memory sticks are
really cheap, and you want to go with a good brand, like SanDisk, Kingston or Integral.
You can buy memory sticks of different capacities. Depending on how much you need to store, you
should probably look for 16, 32 or 64 gigabytes. If you need to store hundreds of gigabytes,
you should go for a hard drive. Hard drives typically store 1000 gigabytes, which is also
called a terabyte. Once you’ve bought your drive, both types
work in exactly the same way. Plug it into a USB socket, and after a short wait you should
see a new device appear in File Explorer. Windows 10 can back your files up to a drive
in 2 different ways. If you just want to set up your backup and forget about it, the simplest
way is File History. If you want to be able to look into your backup
drive though and check that individual files have been backed up properly, you can do a
manual backup. This is basically dragging files over in File Explorer. The downside
to a manual backup is that you have to remember to do it, and there are more steps involved.
To be honest, there is a third kind of backup as well, called a System Image backup. This
contains a snapshot of your entire computer at a moment in time. Actually, the next video
I’ll be uploading is about making a System Image backup, so look out for that.
You really need to make a habit of backing up, so it’s a good idea to write a reminder
in your calendar, maybe once a month. FILE HISTORY
First, let’s back up using File History. With the drive plugged in, we need to click
on Start, then Settings. Click on Update and Security, then click on Backup. Under Back
up using File History, click Add a drive. Select the drive you plugged in.
Now we need to check what’s going to be backed up, so click on More Options. You’ll
see a list of the folders included in the backup, things like Desktop, Documents, Downloads
and Pictures. These folders should cover everything you need to back up. But you can add or remove
them if you know what you’re doing. Now we need to do the first backup. Just press
the button near the top, Back up now. While the backup is in progress, some drives will
use a flashing light to indicate they are in use. This will take a long time – you’ll
know it’s finished because you’ll see the date of the latest backup at the top,
and the light on the drive will stop flashing. In future, when you want to back up your computer,
you can just plug the drive in and leave it. You don’t have to open Settings or anything,
and you can use the computer as normal if you want to. Once every hour, File History
will do a backup, adding just the newest files you’ve worked on, or adding a new copy of
any files you’ve changed. You can always check in the Settings app that
your backups have been working. Just go back into the Backup section and check the date
and time of the most recent backup. When you’re ready to unplug the drive, check
there’s no flashing light on it, then look in the notification area for the Safely Remove
Hardware icon. Click on Safely Remove Hardware, then Eject, and you should see a message saying
Safe to Remove Hardware. If it says Windows is unable to stop the device, you just need
to wait a few minutes then try ejecting it again.
MANUAL BACKUP Let’s look at how to do a backup manually.
With our drive plugged in, we want to copy everything from our User folders, such as
Documents, Photos and so on. Open File Explorer and look down the left
hand side for the drive. This is it. Don’t worry if there are already files and folders
on the drive. At the top of File Explorer, click the New
Folder button. Give the folder a name. I’m going to call it backup, then put in the date
in Year-Month-Day format. Next we’re going to select everything we
need to back up. Find your main hard drive on the left hand side, this is normally labelled
with a letter C. Double-click the C drive, then double-click the Users folder. There
will be a number of folders within this and it should be clear which one is yours. Double-click
on your folder, and you’ll see a list of folders like this. Select all these folders,
the easiest way is to use the Select All button at the top. Then click Copy.
Now you want to find your drive again on the left-hand-side, and double-click on the folder
you created. Now that we’re inside your new folder, click Paste.
Now all you need to do is wait for all your files to be copied to the backup drive. Once
this has finished, you can open these folders to check they contain your files.
Next time you do a backup, just create a new folder with the date in the title, and copy
your files into it in the same way. Your drive could fill up if you keep too many backups
on it, and when the time comes you can delete an older backup folder to make space for a
new one. WHERE TO STORE YOUR BACKUP DRIVE
A lot of people leave their backup drive permanently plugged into their computer. I suppose this
means that there’s more chance of backups getting done, but it does mean there’s a
chance of losing the backups completely. If someone was to break in and steal your computer,
the chances are they would probably steal your backup drive too. If something really
bad like a house fire happened, the drive would probably be destroyed along with the
computer. And the fact that the hard drive is always plugged in means it’s probably
going to have a shorter lifespan through constant use.
It’s best to keep your backup drive locked away somewhere really safe, ideally in a different
part of the house. And if you trust somebody else with your data, it might be a good idea
to store the drive at their house instead of yours.
WHAT ISN’T INCLUDED IN A BACKUP Hopefully your backup will be useful if anything
happens to your computer and you need to recover your files. If you needed to replace your
computer, you could recover all your documents and photos. But there are some kinds of data
that aren’t included in a standard backup – things like emails, calendar data and
address books. For these kinds of data, you should make alternate backup plan. You may
find that email apps such as Outlook and Thunderbird allow you to sync these kinds of data to the
cloud, or even export it so you can store it in your Documents folder.
When you’re planning a backup, just think of the kinds of data you’d miss if you had
to start from scratch, and make sure you back that data up somewhere now.
So that’s everything you need to know about backing up. I’d be really interested to
know whether you went for OneDrive, a Manual Backup, or File History, some other method,
or maybe a combination of all of them. Let me know in the comments below. Also if you’ve
ever had your own data catastrophe, whether you managed to save your own bacon or you
lost everything, it would be really helpful to share your story with others. So please
let us all know in the comments below. If this video helped you, please give it the
thumbs up, and if you’d like to see more tutorials like this one, please hit the red
subscribe button. Thanks for watching.