BACKING UP YOUR FILES WITH PARAGON BACKUP & RECOVERY
Rather than manually copying files, we’re using Paragon Backup & Recovery to automate the process, and back up our Microsoft Office files to an external hard drive, connected via USB. If you subscribe to PC Pro or bought the bonus software edition of issue 278 (which would have an insert between p66 and p67) you will already have this software. It’s available to download until the end of December.
Backup & Recovery’s opening screen lets you create a single one-off backup, but we want to schedule the task so it repeats regularly, so we’ll click “Create backup job” to get started. This opens a wizard that walks us through the various steps involved in creating a backup.
Our first task is to name the backup job, and optionally provide a description – the software suggests using the date, time and name of the source drive. Once that’s done, we need to create a backup set. This could be the whole computer, a partition, specific folders or, of interest to us, particular document types.
Next, we switch to the “File types” tab in the Source pane and tick the Documents option. Rather than backing up everything, we only want to target Microsoft files, so we’ve used the filters box to specify the various Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats. Clicking through to the Target tab, we then select the destination drive.
Backup & Recovery calls schedules “strategies”, and has four default options. You can create your own, but the Daily Backup routine, which keeps at least the last seven backups, and creates a full backup after every six incrementals, suits us fine. If you need to tweak it, click the “New strategy” button. We want to encrypt our backups, so we’ll check the “Enable advanced settings” box before clicking Next.
Finally, the Advanced Settings tab lets you tweak the level of compression and specify a maximum size for the archive. We’re going to leave these both as they are, but will enable password protection to encrypt our files. By default, it uses Paragon’s own encryption engine, but you can opt instead for AES–128, AES–192 or AES–256 if you prefer. Clicking Next completes the process and activates our backup task.