I like backups. They certainly make me sleep better at night. Not having a backup of your data in essence means “it’s not been that important to begin with”. Most people nowadays are using backups without actively knowing it, at least for their personal files. Operating System built-in solutions like OneDrive on Microsoft Windows and the iCloud in Apple’s universe are just the dominant examples out there. If you look into the market you’ll find countless cloud storage providers ranging from free to advanced paid solutions to keep copies of your digital valuables on someone else’s computer (a.k.a. “The Cloud”).
On mobile platforms the situation is a bit more chaotic, but you can certainly have comfort and security. On Android, depending on the manufacturer and your willingness to invest into apps and subscriptions, and certainly Apple’s iPhone there’s no need to worry about your photos and documents in case the device breaks, gets lost or stolen. So why don’t people apply the same comfort to the entirety of their machine?
The Issue
So we can agree on backups being somewhat essential to daily computing. Why is it though, that in many of my exchanges with users over the years one common scenario keeps popping up: “Help, I installed XYZ and now this, that and the other doesn’t work anymore!” or “Something went wrong uninstalling XYZ and I got stuck in a boot loop and had to re-install Windows!”. Uhm, why?
The concept of backups is basically having a copy of the data of importance regularly stored in some other safe location than the working computer. The source might get corrupted, deleted on accident, encrypted by Ransomware or simply lost by a failing hard drive. This doesn’t apply to mere files like photos and documents only.
Did you know that you can create a backup copy of your entire machine, meaning your treasured documents and Operating System? And therefore simply restore it to a point in time before that devastating change happened? As the title announced, in my humble opinion, there is no excuse to not having a complete system backup at your disposal, and I will tell you why.
The Backup Software
Software capable of making so-called image-based backups — a restorable copy of an entire hard disk/SSD drive, not just individual files — is dime a dozen. Both free without sacrificing reliability and cheap for the more advanced home user.
As a Windows user myself I will focus on this platform, but a quick online search will lead to equal results for Linux and macOS. The latter even ships with an integrated solution called Time Machine that’s coming as close to being perfect as possible.
A few (non-sponsored) examples that I myself have used extensively over the past couple of years:
- Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition — incredibly easy to install and offers a simple wizard-based setup experience. Paid plans available for Cloud provider targets and encryption.
- Macrium Reflect Free Edition — a companion of mine for a little over a decade now! Slightly less beginner-friendly yet more customisable, with the nifty bonus of disk/SSD cloning.
Both mentioned solutions offer scheduled backup runs and intelligent space management. You want your backups to run frequently and autonomously in the background, not disturbing your daily routines, while being space-efficient through compression and incremental copying.
The Excuses
So it seems image-based backups only offer advantages — yet I’ve had quite a few discussions with users “against” the investment of time (and optionally money) to set it up. Let me debunk them one by one.
“I don’t have the money for it”
As already addressed, free and reliable solutions exist. Either stick to my recommendations or invest half a minute of web searches to find something for your particular need!
“I don’t have a place to store backups”
Granted, complete system images are a fair deal bigger in size. This makes them less attractive to upload to the Cloud, especially since we’re still living in sad times where ISPs offer very limited upload bandwidth. But don’t tell me you don’t have a spare hard drive with a USB casing lying around.
Some folks are already familiar and equipped with a NAS that can be configured as a backup target. The simplest solution is to recommission an old hard drive from an older PC build, equip it with a basic USB portable case and you’re ready to go!
You can also decrease the frequency of backups (weekly or monthly) so in the meantime you can put that disk somewhere else, like a safe. Just as long as the backup location is not the same machine that could be affected by requiring a restore, it’s all good. 😉
“It’s faster to reinstall Windows than dealing with backups”
I love this one. Yet a surprising count of people argue that reinstalling the Operating System, all applications, setting up accounts etc. is “the easy route”. Restoring a backup takes as little time as instructing the backup software to find the desired backup and start the restore — then wait while doing something else, come back to the completed process, reboot and load the system in the state you used it the day before whatever accident happened.
You can not tell me with a straight face that clicking through the Windows setup, answering the out-of-box-experience wizard, logging in, installing and potentially reactivating your applications is the preferred way to spend an afternoon — compared to the ten to thirty minutes it may take to restore a backup.
And there you have it — no excuse to not have backups!