Page 838 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

Chapter 16. Backups & File

History

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who have a regular
backup system—and those who will.

You’ll get that grisly joke immediately if you’ve deleted the wrong folder
by accident, made changes you regret, or (worst of all) had your hard drive
die. All those photos, all that music you’ve bought online, all your email—
gone. It’s painful.

Yet the odds are overwhelming that, at this moment, you do not have a
complete, current, automated backup of your computer. Despite about a
thousand warnings, articles, and cautionary tales a year, guess how many

people do? About 4 percent. Everybody else is flying without a net.

If you don’t have much to back up—you don’t have much in the way of
photos, music, or movies—you can get by with copying stuff onto a flash

drive or using a free online backup system like Dropbox or your OneDrive.
But those methods leave most of your stuff unprotected: all your programs

and settings.

What you really want, of course, is a backup that’s rock-solid, complete,
and automatic. You don’t want to have to remember to do a backup, to
insert a drive, and so on. You just want to know you’re safe.

If you use Windows in a corporation, you probably don’t even have to think
about backing up your stuff. A network administrator generally does the
backing up for you.

But if you use Windows at home, or in a smaller company that doesn’t have
network nerds running around to ensure your files’ safety, you’ll be happy
to know about the various tools that come with Windows 10, all dedicated

to the proposition of making safety copies.