The importance of backups

This is a draft version of an article about the importance of backups and how to set them up. Hopefully I will later find time to make it a quality article, but for now I think this draft can still be useful for people. So here it is.

Definitely do backups! In my almost 30 years of having a PC, I lost so much invaluable stuff... For example my digital paintings, including 3D paintings (made in 3D Studio Max), my coding projects, my custom-made Anki cards database ( https://apps.ankiweb.net/ I highly recommend it for learning new stuff!), which I was making for years.

 
And recently - part of my music collection that I've been creating for decades: 

- Everything was sorted

- The best recordings were chosen. For example if it's something I love, like Black Sabbath's Paranoid album, I'd get 10 different recording and choose the best sounding one (In the case of Black Sabbath - Paranoid, I highly recommend Kevin Gray's master)

- Songs were rated (so for example I could make a quick search for 5-stars songs and select them and send them to my friend).

So many hours or days were spent creating this ordered, filtered and rated collection. What happened is during the PC upgrade, my SSD drive stopped working, and at the same time I broke the connector on the HDD drive (which had backups from that SSD!). I was able to temporarily fix the connector (and make it work if I didn't breathe in the room and the air molecules around the connector were not moving :)) and copy some music from that HDD with music backups before the connector stopped working completely. I was also lucky, that my favourite music was copied to a 128 Gb micro SD card that I had in my portable music player, so I could recover a lot from that SD card.

So nowadays I back up everything that has a value of > 0. Even if it's close to 0, but greater than 0 :) I use Cobian Reflector for that ( https://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.html ), it's a free program I've been using for decades. I always back up to another physical disk. From Disk1 to Disk2, from Disk2 to Disk1 (or to Disk3), etc. Disks here are physical, not logical (one physical disk can be split into multiple logical disks. For example, Disk1 can have drive letters C: & D:, Disk2 can have drive letter E: & F:. I usually do full copies and keep 2 full copies (you can also do incremental/differential backups, which take less space and time).

And I use Veeam Agent for Windows (they have a free version: https://www.veeam.com/products/free/microsoft-windows.html) to back up system drive. Every day my system drive C: backs up to my drive D: (another physical drive). Since both disks are very fast NVME SSDs, the whole system drive backup takes 2 minutes in background). Then, if my system drive/Windows gets corrupted, it will take me 3 minutes to restore it from the backup (load from a bootable USB flash drive, created in advance, and choose the backup image on my drive D:). I've restored my system drive so many times already. It saved me so much time (to reinstall the system, install every application I had and set it up, etc.) and so many documents that could have been lost.

So, I highly recommend spending time and setting up your backups. Invest in a new drive for backups if necessary. I'm sure all of you have very valuable data on your PCs. Don't wait until you lose it. Sorry for being negative here, but It's not a question of IF you'll lose your data. It's a question of WHEN. You may be lucky for years, but one day you will run out of luck. Things break. People make mistakes, etc.

In 2025, a good, fast 4Tb HDD can be bought for ~$110-120. 4Tb SSD can be bought for ~$180+ (it will probably be slow for this price). An excellent NVME SSD will cost ~$300 for 4Tb, but sometimes you can catch a sale/discount and get an excellent, fast 4Tb NVME SSD for $200-$210. Here's a a link to my article How to choose a really good SSD.

I personally recently got a NAS (network attached storage), it's a mini file server, that can also run applications (for example a torrent or your own personal cloud storage. And you can access your NAS and apps running on it over the Internet, not just in your local network. So, even if you are on vacation in another country - you can have access to files (documents, etc.) on your NAS. I put 2 SSD drives there, and they are now accessible everywhere in my home network. So I can back up to them over the network, with the speed of ~500 MBytes/s (SSDs are fast, and I made 5 Gbit home network). In case you're interested, the name and model of the NAS is UGREEN DXP2800. I highly recommend it. Here's my review of this NAS.

Let me know if you want help with setting up backups, NAS, or a suggestion of a good drive.