I’m guilty of ignoring the Windows prompts reminding me to create a backup of my PC. I use Dropbox to create backups of many of my files, but that doesn’t protect everything on my computer. Neither does OneDrive. There are Windows settings, applications and other odds and ends that I simply don’t back up with any regularity. That’s why I’m using today, World Backup Day, as an excuse to back up my PC, and I urge you to do the same — before disaster strikes.
If my PC were to stop working today, I’d have to set it up from scratch. I’d still have many of my files on Dropbox, but I’d spend a lot of time installing apps and getting everything back to how it was. But Windows provides two different ways to back up your PC: Backup and Restore and File History.
Backup and Restore lets you create a full-image backup, and File History lets you back up and recover selected files and folders. For either method, you’ll need an external hard drive or SSD. The unofficial rule for the amount of storage a backup drive should have is 1.5-2 times the size of your computer’s storage. If your Windows 11 laptop has 512GB of storage, for example, you’ll want a backup drive with 1TB of space.
Below, I’ll walk you through how to set up routine backups of your most important files, as well as how to create a complete copy of your system in its current state.
Backup and Restore
In Windows 11, connect your external drive to your PC. Open the Control Panel and navigate to System and Security > Backup and Restore (Windows 7) and click Set up Backup. (You can ignore the Windows 7 bit. It’s just a holdover from an earlier version of Windows; the Control Panel remains quaintly antiquated.) From here, you can choose your external drive and then let Windows choose which files to back up, or you can choose the files and libraries you want to back up along with a full system image.
A system image includes every app, setting, file, folder — all of it. The benefit of using this method is that if your PC crashes and you have to set it all up again, you only need to restore the system image and you’re back in action. The downside is that the image you create is from that specific moment in time, so if it’s been awhile since you last created it, you’ll lose any changed settings, newly installed apps and files you aren’t storing in a cloud service or backing up to a different external drive.
Once you have everything selected, click Next and then Save settings and run backup.
From this location in the Control Panel, you’ll be able to manually start a back up by simply clicking the Back up now button. By default, Windows will perform a back up every week, but you can change the schedule in settings. Also from this location, you can restore files from a previous backup.
File History
File History is another backup tool you can access from the Windows Control Panel. Go to System and Security > File History to enable it. It’ll copy files from the local folders in your Windows library as well as anything on your desktop, plus your contacts and favorites. From the left, you can click Exclude folders to tell File History to skip certain things.
And if you click Advanced settings on the left, you can choose how often File History should save your files and for how long. By default, File History will back up your data every hour, but you can set it for as often as every 10 minutes or once a day, too. File History will keep backups forever, but you can change it to keep your files between one month and two years — or as space is needed.
Use a Mac? Learn how to make a Time Machine backup in MacOS.
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