Too often I get a panicked call that a person has lost their hard drive (or SSD) and can I help them. Sometimes I can bring back the drive to salvage part of their files, but too often the drive is dead and I cannot do anything. I ask them the question (and knowing the answer is no) do they have backups? Drives do fail. You may experience software destroying the contents of your drive(s). You may experience getting hacked. If you have a backup then you have a chance of recovering your files.

External drives are inexpensive and I recommend that they buy at least two. Alternate which drive is the backup and do it at least monthly. If they create a large number of files then I recommend that they back up immediately afterwards. If you don’t want an external USB hard drive then USB sticks are a great choice too. Main point is to buy multiple devices for backups, buy or make a backup script and then make backups on a regular basis.

You don’t need fancy software if you are comfortable with the command line. Doesn’t matter if it is Windows or Linux. I have a simple DOS batch for the one windows box and I have a callup set for the last Sunday of every month to run the script. Linux I use the file manager to copy my folders to the external drive. Sundays tends to be a quieter day and I let the script or file manager run for several hours copying all of my files.