Once your hard drive is broken, it’s a shame if you have forgotten to take a backup of your valuable data. Therefore, it is important to have a backup solution in one form or another, which can save the data you find indispensable, whether it’s education or work documents, music, movies or photos of the family. Backup can be done in several ways, and we take here a look at a few different solutions to back up your data on your computer. For OneDrives settings in the lower right corner where you can choose which folders must be saved for and what files that you access on your computer In addition to the large cloud services, you can also create your own via special network servers. Save it in the cloud The most simple: a cloud solution. There are many different solutions that work almost similar, so it is very much a matter of taste whether you choose one or the other. The most famous are Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive. Most solutions are very quick to set up and requires no great knowledge. A cloud solution is best when you want to back up individual files, such as your photos, office documents or music files. It requires that you begin saving files in specific folder, or indicate, for example, an image folder to be included in the cloud service. In OneDrive, you can for example open the OneDrive settings (right-click the icon in the right corner by the clock and tap Options). Under the “Auto Save” you can select that when you save an image from the web or a document from word, then guides you over to OneDrives Show Date or Document folder. In this way you less to store outside the cloud by chance. At Dropbox can be better supported. Here you can right-click on any folder in Windows and choose whether it should be included in Dropbox. This means that you can very quickly select specific folders to be automatically saved in the cloud. The beauty of cloud solutions is the ease and availability. You can very easily get access to your backup pool, and it is quick to set up and easy to subsequently control. Minus of this solution is that you have limited free space available in the cloud. On the various services you have access to a number of free gigabytes of storage, but then you have to pay per month for more storage space. Also, it can take a very long time to download all the data down from the cloud again, if you ever need to reinstall your computer. Therefore, the cloud may not be the best solution if you have 154,943 images from Lanzarote, years of documents or a very large Photoshop library. Similarly, there is the whole issue of data security. If you do not feel safe by putting your data in the cloud, then you should choose another solution. If you want to conduct a more thorough backup than the manual cloud service, you can start copying your entire system, called a system image. The vast majority of our readers know very well what a system image or -an illustration is so brief, it is a complete representation of your system often stored on external media. A system / system image is probably mostly a one-time action. After you install all your programs on your computer you need, you can create a system. That way you can easily recover your computer without having to install a multitude of programs afterwards. There are many good tools to create system-images, but we choose to use the built-in feature of Windows 10 and 7. Under Control Panel in Windows 10 you will find the Backup and Restore (Windows 7). Below you have two options: Choose to back up your data automatically, if you have your external hard drive connected to your computer, or create a system image. You must choose the latter, where you choose which media you want to create the image on, then system image starts. From a system you can not access specific files, but only to reinstall the whole Windows. If you need to use your system image one day, it happens through the computer’s Recovery feature. You do this either by restarting the advanced mode (check your computer model of how to do this). Here you select Troubleshoot à Advanced Options à System Image Recovery. First, select your hard drive .. After which you choose whether Windows choose what to back up .. Then choose if you want an automatic backup – and when it should be – and then start your first backup. This may take some time. Get Windows to back up your data For many, a complete system image probably a little shooting with guns on sparrows. The most important is your personal files – the rest you can even reinstall. Under Backup and Restore (Windows 7) you will also find the opportunity to back up your data. After you had chosen your desired drive to backup to choose whether Windows itself must choose what to copy, or you will choose selected folders. Then you have the ability to choose how often Windows to automatically make a copy of your files. How often your computer to perform automatic backup is up to you, but we suggest you at least put it to make it a few times a week. If you are self employed and have not set up some kind of backup plan, it may be smart to put it to implement a backup every day during the lunch break. The good thing about choosing such a solution is that it can very easily be automated in Microsoft’s own software. A drawback may be that your files in an external hard drive is not organized very manageable and instead is hidden deep in subfolders. There are also a multitude of manufacturers behind external hard drives, which also produces software to make it easier to create backup directories. Another alternative is a solution which automatically stores your data in different packages depending on how important backups are. Lifehacker has a good guide on how to use SyncBack program to provide daily, weekly and monthly backups to a single hard disk. Likewise, you can also make a hard drive, which automatically synchronizes your backup every time that it is connected to your computer. The function are found in external hard drives such as Western Digital or with programs like Pure Sync. Save on a network drive If you want to get rid of connecting an external hard drive from time to time, you can also do it all over a network server. One advantage with a network server, NAS, among other things, that you can establish a raid, multiple hard drives so if one drive should die, so is your data on the (n) other. Here it is something difficult to propose a single solution as every manufacturer of NAS servers even develop backup solutions, and additionally are a variety of software solutions. However, you can under the same menu in the Backup and Restore (Windows 7) also choose to back up directly to your network server if your computer has access to it. However, we suggest that you look at the built-in options that might exist in your existing NAS. They can sometimes be faster and can create better overview of your files than the software that Microsoft offers. The writer here have had great success using the backup feature in a NAS from Qnap. An alternative would be either BitTorrent Sync, which greatly resembles a cloud service a la Dropbox where you have to choose which folders synchronized via peer-to-peer, or Free File Sync. Free File Sync is a somewhat more manual solution, but in return it easier to organize content on the NAS device.