Oh, this is an important topic!
**VIDEO BELOW**
Backing up your files,
How to go about it? What’s the best way?
Do you buy an external hard drive and backup your files?
Well.. that’s up to you, but what happens if your computer crashed today? Guess what you’d have to do!
You’d have to re-install Windows, your drivers, and all your other programs! (Although you’d still have your files on your external hard drive, re-installing your operating system (Windows 7) could mean big headaches!).
So how do I prevent this, and what’s the best way of backing up my files?
You create a system image!
What is a system image?
A system image is literally taking a picture of your computer as it is today. If something would happen to your computer today, you can restore your computer to the date of that “picture” you took of your computer!
Why is this important?
Well.. it would save you lots of time and heaches:
- Just put your other hard drive in, and restore your image that was last backed-up.
- Don’t have to re-install Windows, drivers, software, etc.
- A sense of “relief” cause you know your computer is backed up and you won’t have to re-install windows! (That takes lots of time!).
So how do I go about creating a system image?
In this video I’ve broken it down to a few options you can choose from:
- Use Windows 7′s Backup and Restore
- Macrium Reflect (You are able to create a full system image in the free edition, which is nice, but not “incremental” back-ups! (Incremental is important!).
- True Image by Acronis (My favorite out of the 3!).
What if I wanted to move my old hard drive to a new “bigger” hard drive?
Well both Macrium and Acronis will do the job! (You are looking for “Cloning”.).
If you search “cloning” into google, you will definitely find your answer. Cloning will again, take a “snapshot” of your hard drive the way it is, and put it onto another hard drive, a larger-sized one if that is your intention!
Ok, so what’s Incremental backups?
Incremental means to increase gradually.
So in other words, Incremental will backup your hard drive with only the updated files you’ve worked on since your last FULL BACKUP. Therefore, saving tons of space on your computer!
**NOTE**
“To restore your system image back to the most recent Incremental backup you will need to have all the increments from your last full back up“. What that means is if you do a full back up on the 1st of the month, and do an incremental back up every day, and you’re computer crashes on the 4th of the month, you will need to have the incremental backups from the 1st-4th. If you are missing one of the Incremental Backups from the 1st-4th you can only back up from the last Incremental Backups that are in chronilogical order! So if #3 was corrupt, you could only restore your computer back to incremental #2, as 3 and 4 would be corrupt! If your incremental back ups are corrupt, you’d have to use the full back up! (Keep that in mind! — Don’t delete the increments, you can delete the old “full back ups and increments” to save space, but not the increments and the full back up they are attached to for your most recent backup!).
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So how often should I back up?
It depends when you want to do your full back up.
But to give you an idea, something like this might work:
Do a full back-up every month, and in between full back ups, do incremental back ups daily. Savings lots of space!
(That way on the 1st of the month if you had to restore, you would be 100% up to date cause you just did a full backup, but at the last day of the month, it could be the most “riskiest”, since you would have 30 incremental backups!).
Nonetheless,
I’ve broken it down into a video for you guys.
Backups are pretty important, so hopefully this makes you guys be aware, and hopefully makes it very easy to understand how to do it!
I’ve always found backing up my files complicating until I realized, I was doing it wrong!
If you want to back up your computer 100% the way it is, in the working state your computer is this day, look into System Imaging and watch this video for more info!
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