Backing Up Your Computer!!

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Many people in many occasions have lost their work from their computer or their computer has just gone bad and they start to freak out about this. People don't like to waste time making backups of their files, they want the computer to do it for them. This is the same problem with the Anti viruses, users think because they have an Antivirus they don't need to check for updates and run a scan from time to time but this is a topic for another day. Back to the topic for this post, backups are the most important task a person with very valuable files in their computer must do. This will same your job one day, you can count on that. It doesn't matter if is a PC or a MAC, you need to have a backup in a external location (don't save it in the same computer, no much sense on doing that).
Backing Up your computer is not as bad as you may think. It may take a couple of hours the first time you do it but that depends on how many files are you going to backup. Also after the first backup the others are not going to take that long. I recommend to have an extra external HDD just for backups, I don't like to have other stuff where my backup is located. After you have your HDD you can make the backup with the regular backup choices that Windows 7 or Mac OS X give you. You can also find very useful tools form third parties software to make your backup. It doesn't matter which one you choose, the important thing is that you make your backup.

In this post I'm just going to go over the native backup tools that comes with each OS;

Windows

If you want to make a backup in a PC running Windows then you just need to click on the Start button and type BackUp in the search bar. As soon as you type it, the tool will appear and you are going to click on it. It should say Backup and Restore. Here you are going to select which files you want to backup or if you want to backup the whole computer, remember to connect your external HDD in order to save your files. After the first backup you are going to do basically the same process with the difference that it would take less time since it would backup the files with new changes or the brand new files.

If by any chance your computer goes bad or you deleted a important file from it, you just have to look for your external HDD with your backup. Do the same process as if you were going to make a backup but click on restore and restore the file or the whole backup itself.

Macintosh

Since we are going to be talking of the native tools of backup then we must talk about Time Machine. This tool is very useful to make backups of your mac, it has a very nice UI and its very cool to use. With this tool you will desire to lose a file to see the magic of it working while it recovers it (Just kidding). This is also a very simple tool to use, you just need to go to Spotlight which is located on the top right corner and type in Time Machine. After you have click on Time Machine it would show an icon very similar to a Clock with an arrow counterclockwise, click on it and turn the option ON. Now you should choose the files you are going to be backing up and the destination (External HDD). For future backups just connect your HDD and it would start making it by itself.

In order to recover a file or many files with Time Machine, you need to click on the icon on the top bar that looks like the Clock. It would give you a option that says Enter Time Machine, click on it and restore the file(s) you are missing. Also you can restore the whole computer by restarting the computer and going into recovery mode or by using Migration Assistant, while in recovery mode it would give you the option to restore the computer with your back up.

P.S: I know this is very little information on such a huge topic but in my posts to come I will talk about each one of this methods by themselves. This was just to give some people the heads up of backing up their data.


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