How to backup your stuff in Windows 10

everyone knows backing up your computer is important but there are so many questions and choices how do you backup do you need any equipment it's cloud storage as good as a physical backup all of these can delay you from making a start on backing up well I'm going to show you how easy and quick it is to do a backup in Windows 10 and how you can even do your first backup right now in my job doing tech support there's one phone call I get several times a month the customer will have turned on their computer and all they get is a black screen in that moment they think of all the work they've got stored on their computer all the family photos all the important stuff they might never see again one of the most heartbreaking times this happens is in the late spring or early summer when students phone me and tell me the dissertation they've been working on continually for months has just vanished and all too often the client won't have an up-to-date backup they'll tell me things like they didn't know how to get started what they needed to buy or just that they've got a backup but it's not up-to-date enough to cover what they've lost now normally I'm able to fix some problem with the computer switch it on again and usually find the data is all where they left it but sometimes I have to break the news that their hard drive has failed and there's absolutely nothing we can do to get the data back whatever the outcome I always make sure they know how to do a backup in future so my mission with this video is to get you to do a backup today ideally I'd like you to keep backing up in future but to be honest if you just make one backup after watching this video today it could be the difference between having everything and having nothing [Music] the first thing you need to decide is whether you're going to store your data on the cloud or on a physical drive like this if you want to keep everything really safe I'd recommend both and I'm going to cover both cloud storage and physical storage in this video cloud backup means using a service like Dropbox onedrive or Google Drive to keep a secure copy of all your files on the Internet to keep things simple I'll be covering onedrive because it's built into Windows 10 with onedrive you get five gigabytes of storage for free which is plenty if you'll just be storing documents however if you'll be storing a large photo collection you'll probably want to go onto a onedrive subscription which I'll be discussing later above all cloud backup is convenient because once you set it up you don't need to remember to do any backups in future it's just constantly syncing if you find yourself with a broken computer all you have to do is find another computer that works sign in with your username and password and all the data will be there waiting for you on the cloud not all cloud storage works well as a backup though because it's possible for your computer to get infected with something called ransomware and if the file your computer becomes unreadable the version of that file on the cloud is only going to have the same problem this has changed since onedrive introduced file restore which means older versions of all of your files are kept on the cloud just in case you need to rollback any changes file restore used to be a business feature only but it's recently been added to the version of onedrive that's included with Office physical backups are tried and tested you can rely on a hard drive or a memory stick even if your internet connection goes down or your broadband is too slow to upload all of your files and the secure as cloud services are you can pretty much guarantee a hacker isn't going to get their hands on these whether you're doing a cloud or a physical backup you need to know how much data is stored on your computer click on the Start menu and type in control panel click on the control panel when the control panel opens click in the search box in the top right corner and search for system click on system then advanced system settings then look for user profiles click on settings here look at each user account you want to backup probably just the one with your name on it you want to make a note of the size because that gives you an idea of how much cloud storage or how large a drive you'll need data is normally measured in GB or gigabytes a gigabyte is a thousand megabytes and a terabyte is a thousand gigabytes whether you're buying cloud storage or a physical drive make sure it's got enough capacity for the data you've got now plus the data you're likely to have in future first of all let's do it backup using onedrive you don't need to go out and buy anything so you can do your first backup using onedrive right now onedrive is already included with Windows 10 so you don't even need to download anything just open your file explorer and click on onedrive if you're not already signed in it will ask you to sign in using your Microsoft account if you don't have a Microsoft account go to onedrive comm and click on sign up for free once you've signed into onedrive you should see a couple of folders in there like documents and photos you can create more if you like all you need to do now is start storing your files here instead of the existing documents and photos folders for now we're going to copy all of your documents into onedrive so go into your existing documents at the top of File Explorer you will see the home tab and under this you should see select all click select all then click copy now open your onedrive and go into onedrive documents click paste all of your documents will be copied into here now you could delete everything that was in the existing Documents folder but I don't want you to delete anything until you're completely comfortable with how everything is stored now you can go into your existing photos select everything you see [Music] and click copy then go into the onedrive photos folder and click paste from now on when you create a new document or take some new photos make sure you store them in your onedrive folders then there'll always be backed up you can check the status of your onedrive by looking at its icon down in the notification area here we can see this spinning arrow symbol which tells us that onedrive is processing all the files we just added to it there's a setting in onedrive that we probably want to turn off let's have a look at it right click on the onedrive icon then go to settings under the settings tab look for files on demand what does this do it frees up some space on your hard drive by keeping your files purely in onedrive and not on the computer it means that if you want to work on a file you haven't used in a while you will need an internet connection to download it first this might be a nice idea if your computer has limited space on the hard drive but if you have a big hard drive you should keep it on ticked eventually you might store so much on onedrive that you run out of the 5 gigabyte allowance they give you for free at that point it's time to think about paying for a subscription to onedrive and you can find the pricing plans on the onedrive website I think you get the best value with the plans that include Microsoft Office now we're going to look at how to backup all our files onto a physical device we've just got to decide whether to buy a memory stick like this or a hard drive like this if your files don't take up much space say 20 gigabytes or less you probably want to go with a memory stick memory sticks are really cheap and you want to go with a good brand like Sun disk Kingston or integral you can buy memory sticks of different capacities depending on how much you need to store you should probably look for 16 32 or 64 gigabytes if you need to store hundreds of gigabytes you should go for a hard drive hard drives typically store 1000 gigabytes which is also called a terabyte once you've bought your drive both types work in exactly the same way plug it into a USB socket and after a short wait you should see a new device appear in File Explorer Windows 10 can backup your files to a drive in two different ways if you just want to set up your backup and forget about it the simplest way is file history if you want to be able to look into your backup drive though and check that individual files have been backed up properly you can do a manual backup this is basically dragging files over in file explorer the downside to a manual backup is that you have to remember to do it and there are more steps involved to be honest there is a third kind of backup as well called a system image backup this contains a snapshot of your entire computer at a moment in time actually the next video I'll be uploading is about making a system image backup so look out for that you really need to make a habit of backing up so it's a good idea to write a reminder in your calendar maybe once a month first let's back up using file history with the drive plugged in we need to click on start then settings click on update and security then click on backup under backup using file history click add a drive select the drive you plugged in now we need to check what's going to be backed up so click on more options you'll see a list of the folders included in the backup things like desktop documents downloads and pictures these folders should cover everything you need to backup but you can add or remove them if you know what you're doing now we need to do the first backup just press the button near the top backup now while the backup is in progress some drives will use a flashing light to indicate they are in use this will take a long time you'll know it's finished because you will see the date of the latest backup at the top and the light on the drive will stop flashing in future when you want to backup your computer you can just plug in the drive and leave it you don't have to open settings or anything and you can use the computer as normal if you want to once every hour file history we'll do a backup adding just the newest files you've worked on or adding a new copy of any files you've changed you can always check in the Settings app that your backups have been working just go back into the backup section and check the date and time of the most recent backup when you're ready to unplug the drive check there's no flashing light on it then look in the notification area for the safely remove Hardware icon click on safely remove Hardware then eject and you should see a message saying safe to remove Hardware if it says Windows is unable to stop the device you just need to wait a few minutes then try ejecting it again let's have a look at how to do a backup manually with our drive plugged in we want to copy everything from our user folders such as documents photos and so on open file explorer and look down the left-hand side for the drive this is it don't worry if there are already files and folders on the drive at the top of File Explorer click the new folder button give the folder a name I'm going to call it backup then put in the date in year-month-day format next we're going to select everything we need to backup find your main hard drive on the left hand side this is normally labeled with a letter C double-click the C Drive then double-click the users folder there will be a number of folders within this and it should be clear which one is yours double click on your folder and you'll see a list of folders like this select all these folders the easiest way is to use the select all button at the top then click copy now you want to find your drive again on the left hand side and double click on the folder you created now that we're inside your new folder click paste now all you need to do is wait for all your files to be copied to the back of Drive [Music] once this is finished you can open these folders to check they contain your files [Music] next time you do a backup just create a new folder with the date in the title and copy your files into it in the same way your drive could fill up if you keep too many backups on it and when the time comes you can delete an older backup folder to make space for a new one a lot of people leave their backup drive permanently plugged into their computer I suppose this means that there's more chance of backups getting done but it does mean there's a chance of losing the backups completely if someone was to break in and steal your computer the chances are they'd probably steal your backup Drive too if something really bad like a house fire happened the drive would probably be destroyed along with the computer and the fact that the hard drive is always plugged in means it's probably going to have a shorter life span through constant use it's best to keep your backup drive locked away somewhere really safe ideally in a different part of the house and if you trust somebody else with your data it might be a good idea to store the drive in their house instead of yours hopefully your backup will be useful if anything happens to your computer and you need to recover your files if you needed to replace your computer you could recover all your documents and photos but there are some kinds of data that aren't included in a standard backup things like emails calendar data and address books for these kinds of data you should make an alternate back-up plan you may find the email apps such as Outlook and Thunderbird allow you to sync these kinds of data to the cloud or even export it so you can store it in your Documents folder when you're planning a backup just think of the kinds of data you'd miss if you have to start from scratch and make sure you back that data up somewhere now so that's everything you need to know about backing up I've been really interested to know whether you went for one drive a manual backup or file history some other method or maybe a combination of all of them let me know in the comments below also if you've ever had your own data catastrophe whether you managed to save your own bacon or you lost everything it'd be really helpful to share your story with others so please let us all know in the comments below if this video helped you please give it the thumbs up and if you'd like to see more tutorials like this one please hit the red subscribe button thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Dave's Tech Rescue

Views: 489,113

Keywords: backup, backup files, windows 10, portable hard drive, external hard drive, usb, memory stick, hard drive, cloud, onedrive, one drive, file history, data, physical, how to, computer, back up

Id: wEbTPRCvyms

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 24 2018