Backing Up

[Rookery]

Hopefully a straightforward question from a decidedly non-techy laptop user to people more savvy than me. Can I do a back up of my run of the mill files (mainly Excel & Word + photos) from my laptop onto a new Sandisk Ultra USB 3.0 Flash Drive? I bought one yesterday for this very purpose and need to know before I open it.
Oh, and how do I do it?
Thanks in advance.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

Simple open Internet Explorer, Go to the files you want to save, Highlight them, Right press copy, Move to the usb , click on it and press paste

Question does you computer have a USB 3 socket older computers will not have one

 

[Rookery]

Thank you very much for your prompt reply. I don't know about the socket but I'll have a nosey around. It's a 3 year old Toshiba by the way.

 

[Rookery]

According to a Toshiba spec page, it has 2 x USB 2.0 and 1 x USB 3.0. So that looks like I'm good to go. Thanks once again.

 

[Russ Michaels]

Windows has built in backup tools for doing basic backups.
just open up your start menu and type "backup" and you should find it.

Also, Windows comes with OneDrive by default, which is cloud storage. So as long as you store all your documents and photos etc in the onedrive folders, and have it setup to sync correctly, then all your data is being backed up to the cloud automatically when you are connected to the internet, which you can access form any browser on any computer and from any mobile device.
The same applies your phone, if it is an android phone then it uses google drive by default, but you can download OneDrive for android, and have it also backup all your files there too.

 

[Highland Spring]

I got a new ASUS laptop at Xmas and for backup at it comes with free web storage, not 100% comfortable with all my files in the cloud, but I have a regular habit of lossing memory sticks and flash drivers so better for me etc.

 

[LiveNetworks Ltd]

Go for belt and braces, local storage on USB great, but consider someone like blazeback for cloud as well.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

You can buy hard drive s to back up with the software already in place so just plug in and they start backing up the whole disk including the system about £60-70. dud to their size you will be unlikely to loose it

 

[Russ Michaels]

Well the best solution is local backup + cloud. This is what I generally recommend to my clients and is what I provide.
So you have a local copy for fast recovery, and an offsite copy in the cloud for redundant disaster recovery. If you also use OneDrive or Google Drive, then this gives you a 3rd level of backup for for personal documents and files, with the added benefit of access anywhere.

 

[Craig Bird]

cloud storage and other sync and share platforms are not really a backup solution, a 3rd party product such as Spanning/Backupify can take a daily (or more frequent) backup direct from these cloud services with a solid snapshot that cannot be modified.

 

[Russ Michaels]

No cloud storage and sync services are not intended as a backup solution, and if you read my previous reply, I didn't actually say they were. I did suggest a local backup and an offsite backup in the cloud. This would be a backup that fully restores your files or your entire system. Cloud backup services (such as Acronis for example) are not the same thing as cloud storage like OneDrive or googledrive etc, since they are used only for storing backups, not for file syncing and sharing.

So the idea is that if you have a disaster, you have a local backup that you can access quickly to get your files back or restore your system in the mimimal time.
If you only have an offsite backup, then it could take you takes to restore your system, as you have to download all the data first on another machine.

 

[Nighthawk Software]

I would very strongly advise against this - there are far too many things that can go wrong.

USB is not a reliable storage format, devices fail occasionally. What happens if the office burns down? You could lose the PC, and the backup if you're not careful. Ideally you need to be taking the USB stick home with you so its in a different location. This means more plugging and unplugging, which will increase the risk of failure.

How often do you plan to run the back up? Once per day? If you have a failure, you're losing an entire days data. And what if you forget to plug the stick in? You could be losing days worth of work.

Also, you are not protected against a ransomware attack. If you get hit, it will encrypt your USB files too as soon as the disk is inserted.

There are far too many things that could go wrong.

The backup solution I use costs just £10 a month, for unlimited offsite storage. It backs up in real time - as soon as i save a file, it uploads it. In the event of failure, im losing minutes of work, rather than days.

It also contains multiple backup sets - if i get hit by a ransomware attack, i can roll back files to a previous version, or even roll back to what the files were a day, week or even months ago.

There are plenty of affordable offsite backup solutions out there, i'd strongly recommend looking for one rather than using USBs.. the benefits are significant

 

[LiveNetworks Ltd]

That £10 a month for unlimited sounds great. Wouldn't mind more information on that as our current solution is costing much more. About 200TB per full backup at the last count.

 

[UK Business Directory]

If you're not backing up much, it's best to copy and paste the data you wish to backup from laptop to external device.

 

[Alan]

That £10 a month for unlimited sounds great. Wouldn't mind more information on that as our current solution is costing much more. About 200TB per full backup at the last count.

lol even at the cheapest cold line cloud storage that is over $1,000 per month. 200TB is a serious amount of data.

 

[Andrew_P]

Hopefully a straightforward question from a decidedly non-techy laptop user to people more savvy than me. Can I do a back up of my run of the mill files (mainly Excel & Word + photos) from my laptop onto a new Sandisk Ultra USB 3.0 Flash Drive? I bought one yesterday for this very purpose and need to know before I open it.
Oh, and how do I do it?
Thanks in advance.

Flash drive is just another storage medium, and you can copy files there the same way you do that on your computer.

However the better alternative for you would be such cloud based synchronization services as dropbox.com which also keep previous versions of the same files. This is not fully managed bakcup solutions but for such beginners as you are - will do perfectly.

So you will have the same up-to-date files between multiple computers and if something goes wrong, you will have backups (previous versions) of your files.

 

[Luciano@VineTec]

Its tougher to answer than one might first think.

As other IT Professionals on this thread have shown there are multiple factors to consider.
How much data to back up? File level or system level backup? restore method? backup frequency, how much data / work can you afford to lose? minutes worth, hours, days worth? Budget? The list goes on.

At the risk of muddying the water and not providing a helpful opinion I would say a cloud based solution that syncs folders(s) and maybe couple that that with shadow copies and pushing a copy to storage such as a USB drive or NAS.
Windows native backup as mentioned previously and Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows are great free options.
Any of us here would be happy to help and have a chat if you needed.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

Check out ACRONIS as it's a proven backup system that you can chose how to use it, presumably much of your data is not mission critical in the day to day running but useful history so could be backed up at less frequent intervals than the really important day to day stuff. I have always found it a good and easy way of backing up and if the worst happens it will soon have you running again on a new computer

I guess there are plenty of similar systems as well

 

[isobeldavidson]

If you want to backup your data, you can do so by reading out some useful techniques from one of the SellTheMobile's blog written on the same topic.
You can google if you want.

 

[ServWise]

Windows 10 comes with MS One Drive which is neatly integrated with the OS, It gives you 5GB for free so you can keep a cloud backup of important files and do a regular local backup as well.

 

[Scalloway]

A cautionary tale about the importance of offsite backup.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-47028242

Divers and academics have offered a £1,500 reward for the safe return of a laptop containing precious survey data from a sunken battleship.

The computer and back-up disks were taken from a flat at Stromness in Orkney at the weekend.