August 29th, 2013
This may sound incredibly elementary but bear with me. Almost everyone knows they need to backup their important computer files. The trouble is that most people (like me) procrastinate. One of the best ways to approach backing up your files is by creating a schedule.
Everyone has different backups needs. For my purposes, once a month is good enough for me, although I do perform some backups as soon as I update certain important files.
Don't backup the programs that run on your computer. There are various reasons for this, and some exceptions, but for the average home user, I'll just mention that backing up applications is a bad idea. You want to backup the files that you create, edit, and maintain. These files could be text documents, spreadsheets as well as image, video, and audio files, or various other types of files you store on your computer.
If your files are scattered all over your computer, or across multiple devices it's going to be more work to back them up than if you have them in one main folder. I have many folders but they're all within one main folder. So, for the sake of your time, put all files you want to backup into one main folder on one computer.
I talk a bit more about backups and what would be a good backup medium in my article Backup Your Important Data. No matter what medium you're using, you should keep multiple backups. What this means is that instead of just making one backup and then overwriting it with the new one, keep at least 2 backups - one for this backup and one that was performed at the last scheduled backup. You'll want to delete the oldest backup and create a new folder and backup the files to that. This allows you to be able to go back to previous versions of files as well as ensure that if something should happen to one of the backup folders, you still have the other.
Again, this may sound elementary, but you should label your backup folders with the date you perform the backup. That will help you keep track of when this data was backed up and when you're due for the next backup.
Keeping the original file and the backup copy on the same hard drive or storage medium is not a good enough backup due to the fact that if the storage medium fails, you lose both files. So keep the original file and the at least one backup copy on different storage mediums.
Remember, the hard drive in your computer's days are numbered. It is one of the pieces of hardware that is most likely to break down. Be sure not to rely on it too heavily. So please, for your sanity's sake - BACKUP YOUR IMPORTANT DATA.
Backing up files is a boring and often thankless task, that is until you lose a file (or files) and can't recover them. Then, the backup would have been worth it's weight in gold. Hopefully, this article has given you some ideas about backing up your files so you won't ever run into that situation.