Avoid Data Death: How to backup your computer using EaseUS Todo Backup Home

Note: this software was sent to me for review and as usual it is 100% my experience.

Let me ask you this:  If your computer was stolen right now or suffered some sort of critical failure, how much work and data would you lose?

A day? A week? A month? Everything?

Those thoughts were racing through my head as I frantically dealt with a power surge that almost corrupted my hard drive!

After my brush with data-death, it was a startling reminder that I need to back up my data more often and in a more reliable way.

How to back up your computer?

There are several ways to back up your computer. You can create accounts on Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, One Drive and simply copy and paste important docs to the cloud.  That is a backup.

The danger with this is that you have to actually remember to do this all the time and for most of us, that is simply not going to happen and even if we did, that only backs up the files, but what about the rest of the computer?

I want everything backed up including all the applications I installed, the settings I have set up, and the documents I have. Essentially if I lose my computer, or if I migrate to an SSD hard drive,  I want everything back like it was without me having to spend hours reinstalling everything and setting it all up again.

That is why I use EaseUS ToDo Backup Home system. Not only does it automatically back up your files, but it also has several other features that make it simple to use and ideal back up tool.

How to back up your files with EaseUS ToDo Home

After you install the app from the EaseUS website, you will need to connect your external drive to your computer. The external drive doesn’t have to be a fancy one, just something with a large enough capacity to keep all your data. You can pick up a Western Digital 2TB external hard drive for $60 or you can go big with a NAS device.

Next up open the EaseUS ToDo Backup Home software and you will see a simple interface. Head over to the left side and select File  Backup. You will then need to select the folders that you would like to back up and you can include or exclude file types too.

Enter the destination of where the backup will reside which is your external hard drive.

You can give your backup plan a name and a description such as Daily Backup or anything that will make it easy for you to instantly identify the backup set.

Next click on Schedule and select the Daily option which is where you set up the time when you would like the backup process to start. As backup take a while to complete and are typically resource intensive, I set my backups to run at 3am when I am not going to be using my computer.

Now select the backup method – Full, Incremental or Differential and click on Save.

What is the difference between Full Backup, Incremental Backup and Differential Backup?

This is something that has confused many so without getting into the heavy details, here is what you should know about the various types of backups you can do.

What is a full backup?

This is a complete backup of everything you want to backup. The backing up process is the slowest and needs the largest amount of disk space.

With this backup, you can recover files in the shortest time as no other image file has to be read first.

It is also worth noting that a full backup is the base that is required for all subsequent incremental or differential backups.

What is an Incremental backup?

This type of back up only backs up files that have changed since the last backup (Full, Incremental or Differential). In other words, if you have a Word document that has been backed up and then you add a few more paragraphs, it will recognize that the file has changed and back up those changes.

Every subsequent change to files is incrementally backed up forming a chain.

This is the fastest type of backup and required the least storage space. HOWEVER, restoring is slow and if one of the incremental images in the chain is damaged, all of the following images will fail.

What is Differential backup?

This type of back up backs up files that have been changed since the last FULL backup.

It is faster to create than a full backup, but slower than an incremental backup but the advantage here is that if one file in the backup chain is corrupt, the rest will be fine.

Ideally you should have a mix of Full backup, Incremental backup which happens daily and a differential backup which happens weekly. Obviously, everyone’s needs are different so this is by no means a rule-of-thumb.

So in summary:

Now that I have my external hard drive connected to my computer and the EaseUS ToDo Backup Home running, I am no less stressed about losing data as I know it is being taken care of.

I have also used the same software to CLONE my entire computer so in case I need to recover everything I can simply do that which is especially handy when you upgrade your computer!

For more info, check it out here and get 50% off too!