To avoid the lonely, disabling pain and regret that accompanies the loss of computer data, family pictures, emails, school work, you MUST BACK UP, NOW!!!. ALL mechanical hard drives eventually fail, SSD drives much less. So will yours, usually randomly and arbitrarily, and (in our modern world of making everything as crappy as possible,) much sooner than you'll expect. I see this many times a month.

Think of it this way. If you spend the $55 for an automatic external backup drive or $85/yr to a cloud based service like Carbonite, then you are golden. You are smarter than the average bear! If you drop the computer, the hard drive fails, a ransomware virus encrypts all your files, the Windows 11 upgrade deletes your files, you spill tequila, it gets stolen, fried by a lightning strike, user account deleted by a mangled Norton update or your computer gets locked by a bogus tech support guy you let remotely log in, then you will still suffer a bit. But having that backup will make you feel really, really good about yourself.

I usually recommend Carbonite if you have more stuff than will fit in the free 2 GB Dropbox account. I do have one firm recommendation: avoid Microsoft OneDrive! It will be on your PC already. Do not encourage it, log into it, install it, or save anything to it. Office 365 will try and trick you into this, but if you take your time you can still find the option to save ONLY to your hard drive in the folders you choose. I would love to say how convenient OneDrive can be, giving you default cloud backup while you are using Word and Excel. But I can’t. I often get to people’s computer and they ask me to find their missing Word documents for them. OneDrive is an aggressive, buggy, confusing, unintuitive, piece of crap. And it is impossible for the average user to become disentangled from it once you give it control. You should always be seeking to become less beholden to Microsoft, whenever possible.

Having a backup can be easier than you think. There are many different options depending on how much stuff you got. I can help you figure this out and bring you into a state of total relaxation on the subject.

Remember, whatever backup you chose, you must have duplication. You must have two of whatever you are backing up. One on one device, and the copy on another device or in the cloud. If you save all your love poems only to your flash drive and then leave it at The Coffee Cavern because you were absent minded after a good yoga class, you have not made a backup.