Our computers store a lot of information – documents, photo’s, email history, contact details and so on.
Have you thought about how safe all this information is?
Backing up our computer to protect this data is an often-overlooked procedure that should be given serious consideration.
Computer hardware is not infallible and a regular procedure to perform a backup is a simple process and is low cost.
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What do you need?
Although Windows comes with a backup program, a better option is a program called Macrium Reflect.
There is a free version that provides all the features to do regular backups.
The only cost is an external USB hard drive that can be purchased for under $100.
Macrium Reflect not only backs up your data, but also Windows itself and all your programs – after a computer is repaired or replaced the most recent backup can be used to restore your computer back to exactly as it was.
Note: if you are an Apple Mac user it comes with a backup program called ‘Time Machine’ which is all you need.
Full and Differential Backups
Macrium has two types of backups in the free version – Full and Differential.
If we only did full backups, our external hard drive would get full pretty quickly, so we have a backup type called Differential.
Full is pretty obvious, as mentioned above Macrium backs up your complete computers hard drive – Window, the installed programs and all your data.
Differential backs up anything that has changed since the most recent full backup – this is totally automatic and when the backup may be required in the future it combines the differential backup with it’s related full backup and displays that as one collection of your files
Note, there will soon be a YouTube video to better explain how to use Macrium Reflect and it’s features.