Back up your data
Implement no less than three different back-up regimens to help protect your most critical files from data loss.
LET’S START WITH backing up your data files. These are typically files you’ve created yourself, such as documents, photos and videos. Their personal nature makes them irreplaceable if lost, which is why you should back them up separately from the rest of your PC.
When backing up, it also pays to store multiple versions of your files, giving you the opportunity to roll back to an earlier version if you accidentally save unwanted changes. This functionality is built into Windows in the form of File History, which you can set up by clicking Start > Settings > Update & Security > Backup. If you’ve not already set it up, you’ll be prompted to do so now by choosing a backup drive to save to. Click ‘More options’ to choose exactly what to back up – key user folders should automatically be included, but if you store data outside these (say on another internal drive or partition) then click ‘Add a folder’ to add those too. Other options include frequency of backups (with versions taken every ten minutes if required) as well as how long to keep backups for.
OTHER BACK-UP OPTIONS
If you want the security of an additional backup, download and install Paragon Backup & Recovery Free from www.
paragon-software.com/free/br-free/ (free, registration required) – this can take both file-based and image-based backups. The step-by-step guide on the page opposite reveals how to set up your own set of full and incremental backups, giving you the luxury of daily versions to choose from. If you have two backup devices to save to – say a USB drive and a network drive – consider saving this job to a different drive to File History for greater data redundancy, or to your cloud drive using Cryptomator to provide additional encryption as described earlier.
When you first launch Paragon, you’ll be prompted to create rescue media, which is needed for emergencies or when recovering entire drive images. For now, either click to follow the prompts or click the Settings button in the program and choose Recovery Media Builder. Insert an unused USB flash drive that’s 512MB or larger. Select ‘Use this Windows image…’ under ‘Creation mode’ before clicking Next and following the steps to create that potential lifesaver.
The final backup you need to configure is your cloud-based backup. OneDrive, Google Drive and so on typically create their own folder inside which you store your data separately to your regular user folders. If you go down this route you might want to direct Windows to use the sub-folders inside your cloud folder instead of the regular user folders: open File Explorer, right-click Documents and choose the Properties > Location tab. Click ‘Move’, then point it to the Documents sub-folder inside your cloud folder (for example, OneDrive\Documents or Google Drive\Documents). Click ‘OK’ and agree to move your existing files to the folder so they’re easily accessible. Repeat for your other user folders.
Going forward, not only will your user folders automatically stay synced with the cloud (where again multiple versions of your files are stored), but they’ll also be included in your local backup jobs for that extra level of security.