How To Backup Windows 10 & 11 For Free!!

today I'm going to show you how to set up an automatic backup without any thirdparty software and best of all it's free stay tuned okay this is a topic that I've covered before but I haven't gone into a lot of depth like I'm going to do today several weeks ago I did a video where I briefly showed how to set up file history as an automatic backup several people responded to that video arguing that file history can't be used as a backup now I'm going to tell you why I disagree with them but first we got some bills to pay so check out today's sponsor is your copy of Windows 10 unactivated well it doesn't have to be because with today's sponsor vipd key you can get a valid Windows 10 license for under $20 stop dealing with that stupid watermark on the desktop the valid license for Windows 10 also with an activated copy of Windows 10 you can upgrade to Windows 11 for free just go to the link in the description below and pick up a valid Windows 10 license key during checkout use the code cyber CPU for a 25% discount once you have your key go to your activation settings in Windows 10 and click on the link that says change product key enter the product key you just purchased and hit activate now you don't have to deal with that stupid Watermark that come with running an unactivated copy of Windows 10 now on with the video so like I said many people disagreed with me for recommending file history as a backup many of their points were actually valid for instance a few people said that if your hard drive ever failed file history wouldn't help you but unfortunately this isn't the case because the way I'm going to show you how to configure file history is by using a separate hard drive to store that file history on I also had the complaint that if your backup doesn't include cloud storage then it's not really a backup this one I have to fundamentally disagree with while I'm not arguing against using Cloud backup the implementation of cloud storage isn't what makes a backup a backup because you see the definition of a backup is simply having another copy of your data this copy could be stored on the cloud or on another hard drive in fact if you just manually back up your files once every week or two that's considered a valid backup unfortunately it'll probably be out of date because you'll probably forget to keep up with it so I highly recommend against going that route ultimately though I do recommend using cloud storage but many people can't afford a monthly charge to back up their data to the cloud and if that's you then that's perfectly fine the benefit of using file history is that it's easy to set up and it's free and it's also better than nothing because here's the thing I've had the unfortunate job to notify customers thousands of times in the past that they've lost all their data it's probably the worst part of my job what makes it worse is that an inexpensive external drive and a couple of minutes flipping some switches in Windows could have made a huge difference when it comes to computers one thing is going to be true for everyone there is going to come a time when your storage device will fail and you will lose all your data it isn't a matter of if it happens I'm telling you right now that is going to happen and if you don't have a backup then that data is gone forever it doesn't matter how important it is when it's gone it's gone and there's nothing you can do about it that's why it's important to have at least something as a backup it doesn't matter if it's a local backup or a cloud backup something is always better than nothing yes using file history as your primary backup does have some downsides for one it's not an encrypted backup and in the event that you're a victim of ransomware it's possibly not going to help you there's a very high likelihood that the ransomware will find the files within the backup and encrypt them too also a local backup of any kind whether it be file history or every other local backup program ever made isn't going to help you in the event that your house burns down or someone steals your computer with the backup drive so like I said before the way that we avoid these problems is by using a cloud backup service but just because this backup method doesn't include backing up to the cloud doesn't mean that it's not worth using in fact with that said even if you do use a cloud backup service there's no reason why you can't still use file history because one thing I've learned during my career as a computer tech is that you can never have too many backups I personally back up all of my computers to a network attached storage server which uses a redundant dis array just in case one of the drives fails and then that server is backed up to the cloud I've lost data several times in my past and I'm not messing around anymore so no matter what happens there's always a copy of my data somewhere so just because I'm showing you a free and easy way to back up your data doesn't mean that I don't also recommend backing up your data to other methods as well now with all that said today I'm going to do this setup twice on Windows 10 and windows 11 because the setup is a little bit different in Windows 11 however watch the entire video because only going to show you the differences with Windows 11 but most of the guide is going to be concentrating on Windows 10 now with all that said let's jump on the computer and I'll show you how to set up file history as an automatic backup okay so here we are in Windows 10 this is where I'm going to show you how to set up the majority of this backup but we also will be doing this in Windows 11 just so I can show you the differences now the first thing that we need to do obviously is plug in our external drive cuz we're going to need something to store this back up too so I'm going to go ahead and plug this in now but keep in mind that if you're using a desktop this is really easy because you just essentially leave the external drive plugged in all the time however if you're using a notebook this can be a little bit more complicated because of the fact that on a notebook you really don't want to carry around an external drive all the time so it can it can complicate things I have seen people before actually velcro the external drive to the back of the notebook though so it is possible to use it that way so now that it opened here we can go ahead and click close it and now the first thing that we're going to want to do is we're going to want to open up settings and then from settings we want we want to go to update and security and then from update and security we want to go into backup right here and then from this screen right here this is essentially where you set up file history and this is ridiculously easy essentially all you do is Click right here where it says add a drive and you select a drive from the list and then it goes through and configures most of everything else automatically but what you can do from this point point is this is what I recommend is go ahead and click on more options and then once more options opens it might take a second it'll give you your different settings for the backup here and as you can see the back the backup hasn't actually started yet so what I recommend doing is setting up your actual schedule Itself by default it shows every hour but I don't recommend doing that it's going to take tons of resources from your system and it's unnecessary so I typically set this to daily so it'll at least give you a daily backup and then for keep my backups this essentially wants to know how many versions of your backups you want to use now if you leave it on forever it's going to fill up the hard drive so what you want to do is Select this until space is needed and what this will do is it will still fill up the hard drive but then it will delete the oldest versions of files as new ones are saved in order to save space and then from there if you want you can also add a folder so if you were to click add folder like for instance on my system on the C drive I have a folder that I keep a lot of stuff in just on the root directory I call it cyber CPU you might have other folders in other locations that aren't included in this backup so I'm going to go ahead and click that and hit choose this folder in order to add that folder to the list and then at this point you just push back up now and it starts backing up now depending on how much data you have this initial backup could take quite a while in fact if you have a lot of data it could take hours to finish now mine's not going to take that long because I don't have a lot of data on this system this is just a test install of Windows 10 so there's very little data on it so I'm going to go ahead and let this finish and then we'll continue on okay so the backup's finished up and once it's done you can see in the overview right here it'll tell you the last time the backup completed as well as the size of the backup itself is as you can see my backup is 20.5 gigabytes now if you ever want to restore something from a backup there's a couple different ways you can do it for one you can scroll down here it's same place where you went to set this up and you can click on restore files from a current backup right here and then from here essentially what it does is it opens up a file history window and you can go through to the file that you're looking for like for instance say you want to go into pictures and we'll look for the background that I currently have right now which is this one right here and then what we could do is we can push this button to essentially restore it to the original location however there's another way you can do this too and this is why I really like file history so I'm going to go ahead and close this and we'll minimize this one and let's just move over to the file itself so we'll go to the same picture that we had before and then you right click on the picture or any document that you're using and click on properties and then from properties you want to click on this tab that says previous versions and as you can see you'll have previous version saved now this right now is obviously only one version because we just started the backup however if I modified this picture then the next time the backup would run it would save a different version of this file now for whatever reason if you want to restore this one you can restore it in a couple different ways you can either click on restore right here restore to the original Loc or you can hit restore two and if you hit restore two it will save it anywhere you want so if we throw it on the desktop and hit select folder then there you go now we have it sitting on the desktop restored from the backup itself now the next thing that I want to show you right here is we're going to go ahead and close all this and we're going to go back into settings and we're going to click on see advanced settings and then from this point it throws you into control panel where the more advanced file history settings are and the reason why I want to show you this is because you don't necessarily need an external drive to use file history what we can do is we can go ahead and click on select drive right here and as you can see right now currently we're using our external drive however we can add a network location so if you click on ADD Network location here then you essentially just go to your network and unfortunately it's not going to be easy for you so you'll have to type in your network manually at least that's the way I do it so if you click backs slashback slash and on mine it's Nas is the name of my network attached storage server I know I'm very creative and then we go into storage it'll go ahead and go to my backup server now I already made this folder for this video so if I click on a folder you can make it any folder you want on a network storage location you can go there you can hit select folder and then hit okay and it'll ask you if you want to move the existing files to this new backup location now you can decide to do that or not I'm going to go ahead and decide to do that so if you hit yes then it's going to take a minute but it's going to transfer all of those backed up files over to your new backup location so at this point if you choose another location for your backup like a network drive or even another external drive if you decide you want to upgrade to a bigger one then you can once it finishes copying the backup to that new location you can unplug the old drive because file history only uses one location to back up your documents at this point once I transfer this over to the network it's no longer going to use the external drive anymore it's going to use the network only now this is a great solution if you have a note notebook because if you have a notebook you can always back it up to another computer on your own network or a network attached storage unit if you have one available to you so that's a good opportunity to be able to back up your system without having to haul around an external drive with you everywhere so I'm going to go ahead and let this finish copying and then we'll move on to the next step okay so here we go so now you can see that the file history storage location is actually on a network drive instead of on an external drive like it was before before and at this point we're pretty much done with Windows 10 what we can do at this point is we can go ahead and unplug the external drive because now we're using the network to save our files to however if you didn't set up the network then don't follow this next section right here but what I'm going to do is I want to go ahead and close all this stuff down real quick and then I want to go into my file explorer because obviously we still have the external drive plugged in and it still has a copy of our data on it however I want to delete that because the next thing we're going to do is I'm going to going to show you how to set this up in Windows 11 so once we delete file history from this right here then we can go ahead and open up Windows 11 and through the magic of virtual machines we're going to go ahead and use a virtual machine to do windows 11 so the only thing that I'm going to need to do here is attach my USB drive to my virtual machine so that we can use it here and we'll go ahead and make it full screen as well so if we go into our file explorer here we should be able to go to this PC and we'll see our backup sitting right here and as you can see there's nothing actually on the backup so the first thing we need to do in Windows 11 unfortunately is we can't go to settings like we did in Windows 10 I know it's kind of annoying that Microsoft has moved everything from control panel to settings but for some reason they eliminated the file history settings from settings in Windows 11 so what we can do is we click on our start menu and we just type in control panel to open up control panel and we're going to have to do this all from the advanced settings so the first thing you do in control panel is just search for file history and then once you find that go ahead and open it up and you'll get the same file history page we were on in Windows 10 and as you can see it's already detected that we have a hard drive plugged in that we can use so what we can do is essentially on Windows 11 the thing you do is just push turn on and it should turn on at that point so now what it's going to do is it's going to go ahead and save a copy of file history into our new backup location and as you can see if we can go over right here go into this PC go into our back back up you can see that file history created another folder for Windows 11 so now that we have this one set up here there's a couple settings that we can change from within advanced settings so what what we'll want to do is go ahead and click on the advanced settings here and here's where you would change the schedule like we did in Windows 10 and same thing I would suggest daily and I would suggest keep the save versions until space is needed and once you do that you can go ahead and hit save changes and it will apply those changes to your backup now when it comes to adding folders in Windows 11 it's a little bit more difficult than it was in Windows 10 we don't have a really cool GUI in it like we did before now we do have a way to exclude folders so if we click exclude we can add folders to the exclusion list but there's no way to add folders at least not anyway within the GUI to do it so the way you would do it is you actually go to the folder that you want to add so in this case I'm going to go to this PC go to C drive and we're going to create a folder inside of our C drive right here so I'm going to go ahead and create a folder we'll call it cyber CPU and then in that folder I'm going to create a document so we're going to go ahead and take our text document and this is going to be a really important document okay so we have a really important document that we need to back up okay so the way that we're going to go ahead and back this up because obviously there's no way to add a folder from within the file history settings is we're just going to back up into our c drive so we can get the root of the folder itself we're going to right click on that folder and then we want to go to show more options here and then from the show more options you want to go ahead and click right here where it says include in library and include it in one of your normal libraries for this case I'm going to include it in documents so once we click on documents it will include that in our documents library now if we actually open our documents Library you'll see that the very important document is there and then we can also go ahead and close this and then we can click run now to go ahead and run backup again right now and then at this point if we if we click on restore personal files okay so if we want to get to our physical location here because we want to check to make sure that the folder we added is part of our backup so the way you would do that is go ahead and just come up to this top menu bar right here and press C prompt and it'll go ahead and give you your C prompt and as you can see the Cyber CPU folder as well as the user folder is located within the backup so if we click on Cyber CPU you'll see that there's the really important document so you can restore it that way if you want and you can also just like before if we go into our file manager here and go into our C drive go into cyber CPU and then right click on the document itself and go to properties we can also go to previous versions and see that there's a previous version for that document okay so a backup is only important if you can restore from a backup in a catastrophic situation like for instance if your hard drive failed well if that happened you're not going to have a system configured to use file history so let me show you how you can restore a backup from a previously saved file history what we're going to do is we're going to use my network location that we used in Windows 10 in order to facilitate that backup let me show you how to do it okay so we're going to go ahead and close everything that we have opened here except for our file history settings and what we're going to want to do is in order to restore from another file history we want to go to select drive and then the same thing we did before we're going to add a network location and then from here we want to make sure that network discovery obviously is turned on on so you want you want to actually go through and configure your network information and things of that nature but once you get your network set up you want to go to your actual Network location and on this case it's going to be our temp backup folder and from here we're just going to select that folder and hit select folder and what it's going to do is once you click on it you can say I want to use a previous backup on this file history drive and if you check that it'll go through and it'll show you a previous backup that you've made on that drive so if we click on that and hit okay it'll say do you want to use this drive for file history again and at this point if you want you can go ahead and hit yes and then from there you'll see that now we are connected to our temp backup folder but it hasn't actually ran a file history yet but what we can do is if we go to restore personal files now it will go in and it will look at all the personal files that we have and let's go ahead and jump into pictures here and we're going to go ahead and pick the picture that I had for about background on Windows 10 and once we find that one you'll see there it is and we can go ahead and open it from here and there you go we can go ahead and restore this simply by pushing the restore to original location button right here and if you ever decide that you don't want to restore this to the original location you can always come up here and hit this little gear icon and you can select restore to and in this case we're going to go ahead and pick our desktop hit select folder and there you go it went ahead and it restored the picture to our desktop right there so as you can see it's not hard to set up a free backup in Windows 10 and 11 unfortunately though it is a little bit more difficult in Windows 11 but it's still free and it's not that much more difficult so I just want to reiterate this point because honestly I can't repeat enough everyone should have a backup it doesn't matter if you follow my guide and just set up a free backup using file history or you pay a monthly fee to get a service that supports Cloud backup no matter what you decide to do the most important decision is having a backup and like I said before there's nothing wrong with multiple backups but with that said if you've lost data and you didn't have a backup then check out this video where I show you how to recover data that's been deleted or even on a drive that's been formatted because if you don't have a backup there's still a chance you might get it back as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 70,713

Keywords: Windows file history, file history backup, backup files for free, free windows backup

Id: uY5uAren2yk

Length: 20min 27sec (1227 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 16 2023