I’d also remind everyone to keep at least one backup of your files off-site in case your computer equipment is destroyed in a fire or flooding. Keep them in a realtive’s house or safety deposit box or somewhere other than your home.
That’s what I do too, although I mostly just back my boot drive up to one of my relatively unused hard disks, and my family photos are on a RAID 1 (mirroring) two-disk array.
Everything’s backed up via Backblaze remotely as well.
The Librarian:
“Just use the windows backup tool. You really don’t need any 3rd party stuff.”
lingyi:
“+1 to Windows backup for ease of use. It will prompt you to create a bootable disc or flash drive. I’ve used other backup programs including Reflect and ToDo, but find Windows backup the easiest to setup and use.”
As a test, I just used Windows backup on an older Windows 7 Dell laptop. I accepted the Windows default backup settings. This was to a USB drive.
When I view the backup on the USB drive, there’s a long list of “Backup files X”. Each “Backup files X” opens a long tree…but I haven’t been able to find any .doc, .txt, .PDF, etc, user-created files.
When I right-click the USB drive, I don’t see any search function.
So how do I find/view specific files on this backup?
Use the same program that makes the file to open it.
The “restore files” option.