Hey everyone, I'm going to show you today how to back up your computer using
Cobian backup. Which is free software in Windows 10, so stay tuned...
The first part is just going on to google.com doing a quick search for Cobian backup.
It'll come up with Cobiansoft right at the top of the search results for you.
Hopefully. Click into that and you'll see the latest version Cobian Backup 11 Gravity.
At the time of this video at least anyway. So when you click into there,
it gives you a listing of all the different versions that existed. Click on
Cobian backup 11 and there's no need to save it unless you want to keep it to
reinstall later. So you can run it straight from there. Depending on the
speed of your internet connection it should download fairly quickly as it's
not a very large file. So you need to select yes to the security prompt for
user account control and it'll take you into the install. So just go ahead and
hit next. You have to accept the conditions of course. Now with this here
you can keep all the options on accept usually I unchecked the volume Shadow
Copy requester because it gives more false positive errors when you look at
the logs of the success or failure of your backups. So the idea behind the
volume Shadow Copy is supposed to be to allow you to backup files even if
they're left open. But really you need to get in a habit of closing all your
programs and files before you initiate the backup. Then you won't have any errors.
Otherwise leaving the volume Shadow Copy requester on can give you
false positive errors in itself alone in my experience. So I suggest keeping that
turned off or unchecked. In the next option here, running as a
service can be good for servers, but generally for most purposes, application as
auto-starting for the current user. Unless you have
multiple users on your computer and you want to allow them all.
Then you can select for all users.
That's it.
going through to install and it runs through the rest of it automatically.
When it's finished hit done and it's ready for the next step.
So that's how to install it, and next up, I'm going to show you guys how to actually set up the software to do your backups.
and then actually run a backup. So that's up next.
So the first part is opening the program, which it may be hidden in your taskbar, like it is here.
So I like to drag it down where it's with the other icons. So you can actually see it.
Once you have it down there, then we can actually click on it to open the program,
actually, actually.
okay now that we've got the program installed and it's time to set up and configure our backups.
The first thing that I like to do is go into tools and options and under visuals, we can turn on to show the numbers in the progress bars.
There's a lot more in here that we'll save for maybe a more advanced video.
The percentages will show down here now at the bottom.
So we can see the percentage of how the current file is being backed up and the overall backup.
Now setting up the backup task.
You can right click in the middle of this left pane of the window and go to new tasks,
or you can go up to task and select new task.
I like to give this a name of daily backup. So usually it's a backup that should be done every single day.
A couple of important options here we're going to go through.
Making sure it's on by default is it's enabled and to include the sub directories.
If you're doing multiple copies to backup on an individual drive, then you have them separated using time stamps.
So you can identify each back up.
The file a tribute is helpful to have and identifying if a file was backed up previously.
Especially if you're using differential or incremental type backups.
I usually encourage to do full backups every single time, unless your backups are absolutely enormous and gonna take way too long to run.
Now using the Volume Shadow Copy (Chipmunk chatter...)
other experts won't even tell you we confirm that the volume Shadow Copy is not guaranteed to backup certain files.
The next part is choosing the files that you want to backup.
So if you go under add and directory, you can choose your top profile name and it will back up everything in your account;
including desktop, documents, pictures, music, videos;
However, it also includes app data and all the temporary files.
So that can give you false positive errors and
they're false because it's not really a file that you would care about having backed up and
it's positive because it really is an error that it couldn't access those files.
So if you don't want to get confused with false positive error messages,
then it's best to go in and back up these specific folders that you want
such as documents, desktop, music, pictures, instead of grabbing from the top profile name including all of the app and temporary data.
Now you want to go down to the destination and you can choose directory and choose your external backup drive
and that's where it's gonna backup everything to.
If you want to, you can actually give it a path within that and create a folder inside that folder called Cobian backup.
So that way it identifies which program was used to make that backup.
Now you got to go into the schedule and decide if you're gonna go on a schedule of daily, weekly, monthly.
How often, what day of the week, and so on; or choose manually.
Which I usually recommend. That way you have control over when exactly you have time to do the backup,
What time of the day and if you're having all your programs and files closed first.
Which I mentioned before is important, before you run the backup.
Now there's other options here that don't always matter.
Something you might want to consider is the events.
Before running a backup, there may be things like stopping a service, that may need to be stopped so that program can get backed up.
Then after the backup, going in here to starting the service again.
There's a lot of other things that you can do including telling the computer to shut down after the backup is done.
So once that's all configured, you can hit OK and you'll see the properties of that backup configuration file.
You can see the tasks on the left side here, which we gave it the name of daily backup.
How big the backup file is and all the properties.
So now that the backup is set up. Now it's just to show you how to back it up since we have it set to manual.
Now to start the backup you got the icon down at the bottom of your screen.
When you hover over it, it tells you it's Cobian backup.
You're gonna either double-click on it or right-click and go to open.
You could have also right clicked on the icon down by the system tray and chose to run all tasks now.
But I like to open it first, so you can see what's actually going on.
So when the programs open, the backup task should be highlighted.
If it's not, you're not going to see the properties on the right side.
So make sure that's highlighted and you see the properties of that task.
You can then select the single blue arrow to run the selected task.
If you have multiple tasks, you can choose the one with the double arrows, which says to run all tasks now.
So we'll go ahead and hit that.
It prompts you if you are sure you want to run that task and if you want to shut down the computer when it's done.
You can hit OK and it begins the process,
clears the log tab, starts preparing to run the backup and starts calculating and telling you as its backing things up.
Now at the bottom you can also see the percentage of the files of each particular file that's being backed up
and the overall percentage of the full backup.
So that's basically running the backup.
We'll fast forward to the end so you can see what it looks like when the backup is complete.
Now I killed the backup to be able to finish this a bit quicker, but you'll be able to see the information,
and there's something in red indicating that there was a problem with that.
Now it cuts off part of the screen. So what you can do is go up to the logs, the log tab and choosing word wrap;
and it wraps everything up real nice.
So here we can see the total backup time,
how long it took to actually run,
and how many errors that you may have in the backup, which hopefully are zero.
It'll tell you how many files that it attempted to backup and then how many files were actually backed up
actually, actually.
So those numbers should match.
Then you've got the size as well which you can compare to the size of the backup
and make sure that they match as well;
and if there's nothing in red and all the numbers look good you know you have a successful backup.
You can also open that drive where you backed up to and have a look at the files and see that they're in there.
Especially looking for a current file that you've recently worked on.
That's it. Thanks again for watching everyone, and if you liked the video give it a thumbs up,
comment, let me know if you have any questions,
don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and ring the bell to be notified every time I come out with a new video.
Alright, thanks again guys. See you in the next one. Bye for now.