- It is possible that one day your computer
will be broken or lost.
If that happens, you can lose all of the files
you have stored on your computer's drive.
To protect against that,
you should set up a backup,
which is an extra copy of your files
stored in some other location.
Now first thing, let's identify what you need to back up.
I'll go to file explorer,
and earlier in the course we talked about your home folder.
You can get to that by going to this PC on the left,
open your main storage drive,
go to the folder called users,
and locate the folder with your name on it.
That is your home folder.
And if you have multiple user accounts
set up on your computer,
each user will have their own home folder.
When you open that,
you have all of these folders
set up to store your documents,
and your pictures, and videos, and so on.
And these shortcuts on the left link to those folders.
So this is another reason I encourage people
to store everything in the home folder,
because when it comes time to back up,
you can just back up that home folder
to get a safe copy of all your files.
And the next question is, how do I do the backup?
Well, Microsoft has an interesting philosophy on that.
They encourage everybody to use OneDrive.
Now because I have OneDrive setup,
I have a OneDrive folder here inside of my home folder.
And we talked about how OneDrive works a little bit
in the chapter on file explorer.
Anything you store in your OneDrive folder
is automatically copied to your OneDrive account
on Microsoft servers,
and will be copied to any other computer
where you have OneDrive set up with that same account.
So it's an instant backup.
But anything that is not in that OneDrive folder,
is not part of that backup.
Let's take a look at my OneDrive settings.
I want to go to the task bar and click this button
with the upward facing arrow,
and then I'll click on this button that looks like a cloud,
and that opens up OneDrive.
So I'm going to click where it says help and settings,
then go to settings.
And of course you'll only have this
if you have OneDrive set up on your computer.
Next I'll go to the backup tab, then to manage backup.
And from here,
you can set up OneDrive
to automatically backup your desktop, documents,
and pictures folders.
So OneDrive can be great for some people,
but there are some things to be aware of.
Of course it's not going to help you if you don't use OneDrive,
and if you do use it,
you have limited storage space on OneDrive,
so you may not be able to store all of your stuff there.
But the big thing is,
if you don't back up these folders,
or if you store things
outside of that OneDrive folder in general,
then those things will not be automatically backed up.
So for everything that's not in your OneDrive folder
for whatever reason,
you will probably need a different backup strategy.
So let's close this.
And one thing you could do is a manual backup,
and that's something that I do.
For that you just need to locate your home folder.
And again, you can go to your main system drive,
to the users folder,
and find the folder with your name on it,
and then you can just copy that entire home folder
to an external hard drive or something like that.
But for this to really be effective,
it makes sense to set up a schedule,
and repeat the process on a regular basis.
I like to do something like this.
I have an external hard drive,
and when I go to that,
you can see I have several folders set up.
So I have old backups from previous months.
So I can come here,
and I can make a new folder for this month,
and then I can copy my home folder there,
to get my backup as of today.
Now after a while,
I can delete the oldest folders to clear up space.
The problem with this
is that you have to remember to do that on a regular basis.
Then of course
there are also lots of services and applications
that you can buy to do automatic backups.
There are so many out there with different features,
you might just need to do some research.
Some of them are services that back up your files
to an online server,
and some will back up your files to an external hard drive
on a schedule,
like my manual method, but it does it for you.
So whether you depend on the automatic backup feature
of OneDrive, or set up some other solution,
it's very important that you have some extra copy
of your files,
in case anything ever happens to your computer.