Daily Archives: February 14, 2021

• Tasks for the Weekend – February 13, 2021 – Windows backup

  Posted on February 14th, 2021 at 00:54 Susan Bradley Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  Youtube video here

  Tonight I’m showcasing making a backup of your Windows 10 computer. Picking your backup software is similar to picking your antivirus software – it comes down to what you are comfortable with. I personally recommend paying for backup software and not relying on a free version because the paid version normally has more features that I want. For example the backup software I personally use (Macrium Reflect) provides anti-ransomware protection in their paid version. This sets up the permissions on the drive used for backup so that attackers coming in through your access can’t destroy the backup.

  I also recommend taking the time to either building a usb boot flash drive or using the software to change the bootloader so that it does a slight delay in booting and gives you the option to choose to boot into recovery mode or into Windows 10.  A good step by step post on how to install the Macrium reflect software is here. Easeus backup is here. Acronis is here.

  For backup media I normally buy Western Digital external hard drives for my desktop at home, for laptops I put a small USB flash drive so that they can have standalone backups.  I even backup the workstations at the office with a centralized backup server for all of the workstations. When SSD drives fail I want to be able to get the user back onto their EXACT desktop with their EXACT icons as soon as possible. It’s the same way at home. I want my icons and programs back and the faster I can do that, the better.

  Backing up my machine means that I treat patching in the same way I do hard drive failure or ransomware – all of these issues I now know that I can recover from and they are not a big deal.

  Michael Austin has a great topic thread on why he chose the backup software he did.

  Bottom line HAVE A BACKUP.  It will save your bacon one day.

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