We all know we should make backups of the files on our computer’s drive, but oddly, many people do not bother. Why? These apps are free and easy to use, so there is no excuse not to back up.

One reason people do not back up is because drives are so reliable. I have been using hard disk and SSD drives for over 20 years and have not yet had one fail. Drives fail so rarely that some people just don’t back up. The PC has been running OK so far and we assume it will continue that way. Drive problems are something other people experience.

Drive faults are inevitable sooner or later and if you have not experienced one, then you may have just been lucky. Not everyone is so lucky and although rare, crashes and failures do happen.

Backblaze is an online storage company with 750 Petabytes stored (1 PT = 1 million GB) and it uses 13 models of drive. The worst annual failure rate is just 2.72% and many drives have a 1% or lower failure rate (source). That’s not much of a risk.

Hardware failures are rare, but software failures are common. With major Windows 10 updates coming at a rate of one every six months, there is a chance one could go wrong and make your PC unbootable. Then there is malware and ransomware that infect computers, they are also common.

A backup is an insurance policy and just like the one for your car, you hope that you will never need it. However, if you do, it makes all the difference.

Computer disks are not like cars though. If your car suffers an accident, fire or theft, you can replace it with a new one. Of course, you can replace a disk with a new one in the event of a failure, theft, fire or flood, but what you cannot replace is the data on it.

Photographs and videos are unique and irreplaceable. A wedding happens only once, for example, and you cannot gather everyone together to reshoot your lost photos. Backups are necessary to protect your files.

USB backups

There are different types of backups and the first that you need to set up is a whole-drive backup or system image. Basically you write an exact copy of the PC’s internal disk or solid state drive containing Windows and all your files to an external backup device like a USB drive.

This enables you to recover any file or folder on the disk drive that has gone missing or been corrupter. You can even replace the whole drive contents with the backup if you have to replace it with a new one. A computer can be started from a rescue CD or USB thumb drive if the internal drive will not boot.

EaseUS Todo Backup Free

There are many backup tools that can do this, although a favourite EaseUS Todo Backup Free. One of the nice features of this utility, is that you can back up from one PC and restore to another, boot from a rescue CD/thumbdrive, and so on. This might be necessary if you lose a PC through fire, theft or flood and have to replace the whole computer.

Paragon Software has several backup tools for home and business users, such as Paragon Hard Disk Manager. You can back up partitions or whole disk drives. There is even a free backup tool – Paragon Backup & Recovery. It does not have as many features, but it has enough and it creates a copy of the disk and saves it to the backup destination, such as a USB disk drive.

Backupper is another great backup utility that is free and as the name suggests, it backs up the drive and can create whole-drive images. In the event of a disaster, you can recover the whole disk or just the files you need.

Disadvantages of USB backups

The problem with backing up to a USB disk drive is that the drive is at risk from the same fire, flood or theft that the PC’s disk suffered from. They are fine for recovering from drive failures and lost or corrupted files, but they will burn along with your PC in a fire.

They are easily stolen and a drive sitting on the desk next to a PC is a target for thieves. The contents may not be encrypted or protected in any way, so a thief could access all your files.

Online backups

In addition to backing up a complete disk image to a USB disk drive, you also need offsite backups too. This is a backup that is stored at a remote location, so if the building burns down or floods, your data is still safe. If your computer is stolen, you still have your files stored online in a cloud drive.

For online backups, you could simply back up your most valuable files rather than perform a full disk image, but full backups are possible.

Valuable files are those stored in your Pictures, Documents, Videos and Music folders. A utility running in the background can monitor these folders and automatically upload new files and changes to existing ones to the online storage anywhere from once a day to once an hour.

There are many companies on the internet that can back up your files to online storage and you might already be using them to some degree. Both Microsoft and Google offer online drives and they can be used to back up files.

Microsoft bundles OneDrive and Office in one subscription and 1TB of online storage is provided for $69.99 a year.

OneDrive backup options

OneDrive running on Windows is very useful as a backup service and you can ignore the Pictures, Documents, Videos and Music folders on the PC’s drive and use the ones in OneDrive instead.

Right click the OneDrive icon at the right side of the taskbar and click Settings on the menu. Select the Back up tab and there are checkboxes to back up photos and videos, and screenshots. Click Manage backup and you can auto-backup the Desktop, Pictures and Documents folders. This makes sure that files are stored both on the disk drive and remotely on Microsoft’s servers.

Google offers up to 30 TB of online storage, although that is mainly for business. A couple of terabytes of online storage from Google is currently $79.99 a year and storage prices continue to fall.

Back up with Backup and Sync

Desktop, Documents and Pictures folders can automatically be backed up to Google Drive and others can be added by clicking CHOOSE FOLDER if you have the online space.

Disadvantages of online backups

Speed is the main problem and it could take a week to upload the hundreds of gigabytes of files on your computer to cloud storage. This does not have to happen every backup and subsequent backups only upload the files that are new or changed.

Downloading the whole backup is also time consuming. Download speeds are much quicker than upload speeds, but it is still a hassle. This is why it is better just to back up important files and not the whole drive.

Back up with File History

File History is a very simple local backup utility that is built into Windows 10. Open the Control Panel, click File History and turn it on.

Windows File History

An external USB drive is necessary and every hour, it saves new and changed files from your personal user account (C:\Users\YourName) to a folder on the USB drive.

It automatically saves previous versions of files and there is a Restore option. However, no software is needed to restore the files and you can just use Explorer to copy files back to the PC’s internal drive if necessary.

Start your backups

Of course, there are many more offline and online backup programs and services. The important points to remember when working out what you need is:

Create a disk image backup to a USB drive

Back up important files and folders online

Some backup services can create drive images online and back up every file. However, drive images tend to be very large, so you need a lot of online space, a lot of internet bandwidth, and a lot of patience. Store only your valuable files online and drive images offline.