Computer Backup Guide

Computer Backups are essential, especially in today’s age where all our documents, photos and other important files are all electronically stored on our devices. If a hard drive fails or gets infected with ransomware, our files are lost forever.

The best way to prevent major data loss is to have a hybrid setup of Online Backup such as BackBlaze or Carbonite, plus offline backup option where it backs up to an external hard drive plugged in to your computer.

Online Backup Option

BackBlaze has been around since 2007. The pricing ranges around $8.25 per month for a single computer and is billed annually.

Carbonite has been around since 2005. The pricing ranges around $8 per month for a single computer and is billed annually.

Trusting all your files to be securely backed up online or relying only on an online service is not a good idea. The company can have a data loss (less common), it could go out of business or get bought out, prices have also risen, these services used to cost $4-6/month, it can also suffer outage when you most need your files. That’s when an offline backup option comes in.

Most of our clients use the offline options listed below since the only cost is the price of an external hard drive.

We recommend both online and offline backups for redundancy but any backup is better than no backup!

External Hard Drive or USB Drive

A physical External Drive is a crucial and necessary item. Having two is even better. Make a backup of the backup external drive. Starting with one is fine. You can get these at BestBuy, Staples, OfficeDepot, Microcenter or online at sites like Amazon.com

The size of the backup can range from 256GB to 8TB (8,000GB) or more. 80% of our clients don’t need anything more than 2TB, but we would say even 4TB external should be plenty.

We would still recommend you purchase a newer external even if you already have one, the new drives have a faster USB 3.0 or 3.1, or USB-C technology which makes for quicker data backups. You can still use the old drive for redundancy in case one fails.

Here are some of our suggestions. Some brands include “free” backup programs with their devices but we recommend not using the software that comes with it, reading further below and using one of our recommended programs instead, they tend to be more reliable.

Toshiba Canvio 1TB
$55

Seagate 1TB
$60

WD My Passport 1TB
$65

SanDisk 1TB SSD
$80

Full System Backup Programs

AOMEI Backupper Standard (FREE)
- Create a system image to keep your Windows and applications safe. Easily Restore is something happens.
- Backup entire hard disks (HDD), SSDs .
- Schedule backups/syncs for your most important files and folders.
Macrium Reflect (FREE)
- Create images of a live/running Windows OS
- Browse backup contents in Windows Explorer.
Macrium Reflect Home ($69.95)
- All FREE Features above, plus:
- Backup Files and Folders
- Ransomware protection
Time Machine for Apple Computers
- Time Machine already comes with Apple computers and it works fairly well as a backup software for it. You just need an external hard drive to set it up.