What’s the Best Way to Create a Backup of Your Computer?
Backing up your computer could be a little tricky if you are less familiar with the technology. If you don’t know how to create a backup of your computer, we are here to help you. In this article, we are going to show you how to backup your computer.
We will try to explain several methods of creating a backup of your computer. So what’s the wait? Let’s get started.
Why Is Backing up Your PC Essential?
There are lots of benefits of creating a backup of your computer since it can help you recover your important data and files. Nowadays, cyber assaults are increasing dramatically, and one of the most cybercrimes uses ransomware to encrypt users’ databases. Ransomware can encrypt all your computer files, and then internet thieves will ask you to pay a ransom to decrypt your files. You can also lose your files due to a hard drive failure or other hardware issues. However, when you have a backup of your computer and its files, you don’t have to worry about it. Using your backups, you can restore whatever you can lose on your computer.
You can create a backup of your computer and upload it to cloud storage so that you will be able to access your backup anywhere you go. If you choose to backup your computer in an external hard drive, you will have even more advantages. You will be able to use your portable hard drive to restore your file on any computer you want. Furthermore, storing a backup on an external hard drive is more reliable, safe, and easy to access. In this article, we will learn every method to take a backup of your system.
What to Backup?
When it comes to creating a backup, you need to backup your personal user data. You don’t have to back up the operating system, installed applications, video games, and other items. Programs and operating systems can be easily downloaded and installed through the internet. But if you lose your personal files, you won’t be able to recover them from anywhere. That is why you need to backup only your personal files. This includes your personal documents, pictures, videos, and other files. In general, these things don’t require huge storage space to backup. However, if you have too many photos and videos, the backup size will be huge.
Some Convenient Ways to Back Up a Computer
Method 1- Backing Up Using an External Drive
All you have to do is purchase a reliable and affordable external drive for your computer. We advise you to go for a high-quality SSD external storage to get better data transfer performance. If you can compromise with low speed, you can also go for any cheap traditional external hard drive.
Coming to how to create a backup of your personal files on an external drive, there is a built-in function on your Windows 10 computer to create a backup of your personal files. You can use that feature to backup your computer data to a portable drive. Let’s learn how to make this happen.
If you are using a Windows 10 computer, you can follow these steps to back up your computer:
- First of all, connect your external hard drive to your computer using a connector cable.
- Go to the settings by pressing the Windows + I keys on your computer keyboard.
- Find and select the ‘update and security’ tile.
- Go to the ‘Backup’ option from the left side tab.
- You will see an option there saying, ‘Back up using File History.’
- Under that option, you will see the ‘add a drive’ option. Just press it.
- It will show you a list of connected external hard drives.
- Select the drive on which you want to backup your computer.
Once you do that, your computer will automatically back up its data to your external hard drive whenever you connect it to your computer. You won’t even realize it as it will back up your PC to the hard drive within a few minutes.
So all you have to do is time to time, connect your external hard drive to your computer so that you have the latest backup of your files on the hard drive.
How to Create Your Mac’s Back Up to an External Drive
Here are the steps to create a backup of your Mac computers to an external drive:
- First of all, connect an external drive to your Mac using a connector cable.
- Within a minute, you will see a pop up on your screen asking you to use this hard drive for backing up your Mac using the Time Machine feature.
- All you have to do is, follow the instructions on your screen and tap the appropriate options to use this drive to create a backup of your Mac.
- Once you have set up your hard drive to your Mac with Time Machine, your Mac will automatically backup your files to the external drive.
- All you have to do is timely connect your hard drive to the Mac to ensure you have the latest backup on your drive.
That’s how to take a backup of your computer to an external drive. Let’s learn another method.
Method 2- Backup Your Computer to a Cloud Storage
If you wish to back up your computer on the internet, this is the method you should use. There are several cloud storage websites on the internet from which some are free and some premium. You can utilize any cloud storage to save all your precious files to it. So whenever you lose your files, you can restore them using your cloud storage backup. Some online backup services allow you to create a complete backup of your computer on their server. One such service is Backblaze. You can use them if you want to store your computer’s backup on a safe server on the internet.
We hope you have found this guide helpful and informative.