Many of us ignore security of our data on our laptops. The value of our data is usually much more than the value of the hardware itself. Backups are critical. A good backup is the only thing that can stops us from losing all the important data on your laptop. It’s not even that difficult to take a backup of your laptop now. There are many ways to back up pretty much everything on your laptop, even the operating system. We want to help you set up a system that backs up your data automatically. It ought to be something that’s easy to setup. So let’s just get it done, shall we?
Creating a backup for Windows
First, let’s start with a backup of your Windows operating system. You can do this by creating a recovery drive, preferably on a pen drive or hard drive. Having a recovery drive comes in handy to reboot your laptop, in the event of it crashing due to reasons such as a hard drive failure, malware, etc. For a basic recovery, you only need a 1GB pen drive. However, we need to take a complete backup of your operating system, which also includes the system data. This will let you use the pen drive to reinstall your entire operating system again. For this, we recommend using a 16GB pen drive at least.
The first thing you need to do is plug in the pen drive into your laptop or PC. Make sure it’s not carrying any important data, because all of it will be deleted while creating the Windows recovery. 
Now press the Windows button and open Control Panel. In the search box, type in ‘Recovery’, then click on ‘Create a recovery drive’ under the ‘System’ option. A ‘Recovery Drive’ window will show up. Here, you can choose to include system files too in the backup too. Click on it, before moving on to the next step. You will need to choose the pen drive on which you want to backup the data on. You’ll also get a warning that everything on it will be deleted. 
Choose the pen drive and click on ‘Next’. The system will ask you to reconfirm if you’re okay with losing all the contents of the flash drive. Click ‘Next’ again. Once the process is done, click on the ‘Create’ button, and the system will start creating the recovery backup on the pen drive. The process can take some time, because it needs to format the drive and then copy all the files in it. In some cases, it can take more than an hour. Once the process is complete, you will be given the option to delete the Recovery partition on your laptop’s hard drive, along with the system files. This depends on you, whether you need the extra space on the laptop. If not, then you can ignore the step. Now you have a complete back up of your Windows operating system. You can use it to reboot into recovery or a reinstall your operating system, to start fresh if ever you need to. Keep that backup safely.
Backing up large files
We spend countless number of hours downloading movies, photos, music and even games. They usually account for the largest part of the consumed storage. A drive crash means you’ll lose hundreds of gigabytes of data that took days and weeks to download. That’s why it’s a good idea to back up all the large files in advance. The best thing you can do here is take a backup of all your files on an external hard drive. If you don’t already have an external hard drive, we suggest you buy one that suits your storage requirement. Make sure you have enough of free space on it, even after you backup your existing data, for future use. There are hard drives with capacities starting from 1TB. Windows comes with a built-in back-up feature called File History. It’s designed to help you take a backup of your data from your laptop or PC, easily. It lets you take a backup of your data by simply plugging in your hard drive. Just follow the simple steps mentioned below. 
First plug in the hard drive into the laptops. Open ‘Settings’ and go to ‘Backup’. You can also access this feature by going to the Control Panel, under ‘System and Security’. Here, click on ‘Add Drive’ and select the external hard drive you want to backup the data on. Once you do that, turn on ‘Automatically back up my files’, and the system will start copying all the important files and folders. After this, Windows keep refreshing and syncing the data, whenever you connect the hard drive to the PC or laptop. 
By default, File History is designed to take a backup of all the folders placed in popular locations such as the Desktop, Documents, Downloads and others. A full list of the folders can be seen once you click on ‘More options’. Clicking on this button lets you configure other features on File History. You can also add folders that you want to back up by clicking on the ‘Add a Folder’ button. 
Next, configure how often you want to create backups. By default, File History is programmed to take a backup of your data every hour, with the hard drive connected. You can select a frequency of your choice. This feature is great because it’s all automated. All you have to do now, is connect your hard drive and your laptop will take care of the rest. It’s that simple.
Backing up small files to the cloud
File History is great backup solution for large files, but it isn’t necessarily convenient for smaller documents. We recommend using cloud storage services. They are easy to use and are automated for the most part. Since this data is saved on the cloud, there’s no need of connecting a physical hard drive to your PC or laptop. All you need is a stable internet connection. Cloud storage is secure and you can even access it from other devices. There are plenty of cloud storage services available at the moment, such as Google Drive, DropBox, and many other. The one we recommend is Microsoft’s very own OneDrive. It’s mostly because the service is well integrated into Windows 10 laptops and is very easy to use. One of the first things you need to do is sign up on OneDrive with the help of your Microsoft account. Once you sign in, you get a window with all the folders that are being synced with the drive. By default, OneDrive creates a backup of the Pictures and Documents folder. Adding folders and files is easy. OneDrive is integrated into the File Explorer and so it acts just like any other drive on your laptop or PC. All you need to do is drag and drop the folder you want to back up, in the drive. OneDrive will keep updating all the folders automatically. 
You can even get quick access to OneDrive from the Notifications tab. You can further configure OneDrive by going into ‘Settings’ from this tab. Here, you can choose to un-sync any folder you like or setup an auto-save for photos and videos, including screenshots. You can also automatically sync all the office files you work on. 
So there you have it, now you have a backup of pretty much everything on your laptop. It’s great idea to use multiple backup solutions, because it makes things much easier. Before backing up your data, we recommend you categorize all your files on the basis of the backup solution you’ll be using to secure them. It makes the process easier and faster.
