We’ve often talked about the importance of making backup copies of your documents and files that you don’t want to lose, because after all, a PC can crash or get infected with viruses, and there are things that you don’t want to lose under any circumstances concept. One of the best ways to make a backing up your data use a usb hard drive, but many users “get lost” when it comes to how and what to save on them. In this article, we are going to tell you everything you need to know.
A backup or safety copy is, forgive the redundancy, a second copy of your files and documents in another location, outside of the PC. The idea is that if something happens to your primary storage drive, you don’t have to worry about losing anything since you can recover it using precisely that backup. For this work, yes, we do not recommend using a USB flash drive, but a hard drive because it is more complicated that it is lost and broken.
Prepare your USB flash drive for backup
The first thing you need to do before anything else is to set up the USB device you are going to use for backup, which involves connecting it to the PC, making sure the system detects it without issue, and then formatting it correctly. . Also, make sure the USB drive has enough capacity to hold all your data.
To do this, open a file explorer (WIN + E) and go to “This PC”. Your USB drive should be there, so right-click on it and select Format… A wizard will open, where you need to select the NTFS format (since we’ll be relying on the Windows).
At this point you can select quick format so that it takes less time, since we are only interested in removing any content from the unit and leaving it in NTFS formatwhich is the most optimized for what we are going to do.
Once you’ve done that, we’re ready to make the backup.
This is how you backup your data in Windows
Copying all your files and data to USB storage drive can be quite complicated as we all usually have data scattered in different folders not to mention program settings etc. Luckily, Windows has a built-in backup system that will do all of this for us, so that’s the tool we’ll be using today.
To access it, you can either click on start and type “Backup” and directly access the tool, or go to the Control Panel and select “Backup and Restore”.
In the next menu you will see that in the left area you have an option called “Create a system image”, so click on it and a new window will open. In this, you have to select your USB hard disk in which you want to make backup and click next (if the disk does not have enough capacity or is not formatted in NTFS format, it will not let you Continue).
On the next screen, a summary of what is going to be done will simply be displayed, and we will only have to click on “Start backup” and wait for it to finish.
After clicking on the button, another window will appear with a progress bar, which will inform us of the status of the backup. The time it takes varies depending on the documents and data we have stored in the system and the speed of the device we have connected, but generally it should not take too long.
