How to Backup Your Windows 11 to an External Hard Drive #windows11

windows 11 is our brand new operating system and it's really important that you know how to backup your windows 11 computer the easiest way to do that is to back up to an external hard drive and in this video i'm going to show you how but before we start just a quick introduction my name is jonathan edwards i'm a business it consultant from yorkshire in the uk we help businesses with their i.t support and the cyber security so wind11 was released in october 2021 the majority of new computers that you're gonna buy today will have windows 11 installed but it's really important that you know how to backup your windows 11 computer the last thing you want to do is lose your data your photos your music or even your applications the easiest way to back up your windows 11 computer is to use one of these it's just an external hard drive you can buy these on amazon i will put a link below to a decent external hard drive that you can buy try and buy the biggest hard drive that you can so it will hold lots of backups on there so once you have one of these external hard drives all you do is plug it into your computer and then if you look in file explorer we go to this pc you can see i've got two drives here so i've got my c drive this is the hard drive inside of the computer that stores all of my data my external hard drive has appeared here let's say a new volume and it's drive letter d so this is 1.81 terabytes of storage so if you look at my hard drive my actual hard drive in the computer is 465 gigabytes of storage so i can hold lots of backups on my external hard drive now with windows 11 it's actually quite confusing how to back it up so if you go down to your windows icon here and you right click it you can go to settings and then down this left hand side you can click on accounts and here you can see there's an option called windows backup so you think okay this is where it is but when we're clicking here we can see that there's actually not really an option to backup your computer you can set up onedrive syncing so that means if you've got documents you can sync them to onedrive which is the cloud but we don't want to do that what we want to do is back up our computer as you can see there's no option the option actually is hidden away so if we just come out of here and we go to the little search icon here and then in here you want to type control panel and you can see this is the option we want now this is going back to the windows 7 days it's the kind of back end it's the old-fashioned control panel and you can see in here it says backup and restore and in brackets it's windows 7. so we're still using the old windows 7 backup mechanism to backup your windows 11 computer so once we click on that we can then choose an option to set up a backup that will then start and you can see it has detected my external hard drive and it's recommending that we back up to there we've also got an option here to save on a network now what you can do here is actually buy something called a nas device that stands for network attached storage so that is like a an external hard drive if you like but it's plugged into your network so you can save your windows 11 backup across the network but in this video we're just going to back up to the external hard drive that we've got plugged into the computer so we'll click on next now we've got a couple of options we can let windows choose and that is the recommended option that will take a backup of everything all your documents it will even take a backup of something called the system image that'll be all your applications you can actually restore your computer from afresh using this type of backup now the let me choose option is for advanced users you might only want to backup your documents for instance so if you did want to do that you could click on there and then it's going to ask us what we want to back up and you've got to browse to where the folders you want it to back up and you might want to do that but as i said in this we're just going to go back and we're just going to go with the recommended option of backing up everything because i think that's that's easier for most users then click on next and it's just going to give us a summary of the backup now you can see here it's saying schedule so do you want to set a schedule for your backup you might think right every sunday night at nine at seven o'clock at night we're going to back up this computer automatically the computer obviously has to be switched on but it will be automatic so you can schedule those backups to make sure that nothing is ever lost i'm going to turn the schedule off though for this one i'm going to click on ok so now i'm all ready to save my settings and to run the backup as you can see the backup is now in progress so i'll just pause this video and we'll come back to it when it's finished so now you can see that the backup has completed if we look at the backup size it's about 43 gigabytes that took about half an hour to complete now this computer is fairly new it doesn't have a lot of data on that so if your computer's got lots of data it might take a little bit longer you can also see that we've also got some restore options as well where we can restore files from the backup now just a word of warning about the external hard drive that i still plugged into my computer so what i would do now is unplug that i don't want to keep the computer and the external hard drive together maybe there might be a fire or a flood so if my computer got wiped out i don't want my backup getting wiped out as well so i will keep the external hard drive in a separate location and when i come to back it up again i'll bring the hard drive back so that is how to backup your windows 11 computer to an external hard drive thanks for watching and i'll see you again soon

Channel: Jonathan Edwards

Views: 208,000

Keywords: windows 11 backup, windows 11, how to backup windows 11, windows 11 file backup, how to backup windows 10, windows 11 full backup, windows 11 backup to external drive

Id: d3iAiAqMtvg

Length: 6min 26sec (386 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 22 2022