Make sure you don’t lose valuable files, photos, emails and more by creating a backup and recovery plan. It needn’t take long and once you’ve a regular backup routine in place, you’ll find you won’t need to carry everything you own on your laptop. Read on to find out how to backup your laptop data safely and quickly.
What: Copy your files to a removable drive, CD or DVD so that you can easily replace them if they are accidently deleted.
Why: Many people never back up their files until it’s too late, yet using the tools built into Windows, or third-party applications, it’s easy to automate the process.
How: Using Microsoft Windows Backup, Mozbackup, a removable drive and DVD writer.
If your laptop was stolen or damaged, how much data would you lose? How many of your emails are stored in your inbox, or priceless family photos stashed on your hard drive? The chances are you’d lose a lot of information, much of it hard or impossible to replace, yet despite this, very few people make any effort to back up their files. All to often, it’s only once the data is inaccessible that many of us think about backup, by which time it’s often too late. However, it needn’t be like this for you. With a few minutes of your time, and using the tools built into Windows, you can easily setup an automated backup system to keep all of your data safe.
Step One
Backups need to kept away from the laptop, which means copying the data to a removable hard drive or writing it to a CD or DVD. Which option you choose depends on the amount of data you want to backup, a CD can only hold about 750MB, a DVD around 4.5GB, while a removable hard drive can hold hundreds of gigabytes.
Step Two
Before looking at software, make a list of files and folders you can’t afford to lose. This could include your email, photos, documents, music and so on. Don’t forget to include the desktop, if you store files and folders there
Step Three
Decide how frequently you should backup the various types of data you want to keep safe. You may even wish to setup several backup routines, one weekly and one monthly.
Step Four
Windows has a built-in backup system built it, which you can access by going to the Start button, Control Panel, System Security, backup and restore.
Step Five
If this is the first time you’ve run backup, click in the link to Setup backup. You will need to select where you save your backup, such as your DVD drive, or removable hard drive.
Step Six
Now you need to decide if you want to choose which files you want to backup, or allow Windows to do it automatically. If you have the space, let Windows choose which files to backup
Step Seven
The backup will run immediately and then according to a schedule. To change the time and frequency that the backup runs, click on the option to change the schedule, next to the shield icon.
Step Eight
Should you need to recover a file or folder, simply go to Backup and choose a backup image to restore. All files from the backup will be restored, or you can browse for an individual file.
Step Nine
In Windows 7 and Windows Vista, Shadow copy tracks changes to your files. This means if you have worked on a file and made changes, you can recover previous versions, by right-clicking on the folder and choosing the option to Restore previous versions. This can also be used to recover deleted files.
Step Ten
If you use Mozilla Firefox or Mozilla Thunderbid you can backup your bookmarks, browser settings and email using MozBackup, which you can download for free from MozBackup.
