I have the same question Report abuse. Details required :. Cancel Submit. Hi Ravi, Thank you for posting your query in Microsoft Community. I understand your concern and will assist you to resolve this issue Follow the below steps. Let's see how to automatically back up files to an external hard drive with the 3 mentioned tools now. Windows Backup and Restore Windows 7 program is a native tool that allows you to set up a backup plan to automatically back up files, hard drive partition, even including a system image, to an external hard drive based on a fixed time interval.
Prerequisite: Keep the external hard drive connected to your computer all the time. Step 2. Click "Change settings", select the external hard drive "Removable Disk" to save a backup, and click "Next".
Step 3. Then click "Let me choose" and "Next" to specify files that you need to back up. Click "Next". Step 4. Click "Change schedule", set to run the backup task on a schedule by daily, weekly, or monthly, and click "OK". Like Windows Backup and Restore, Windows File History is another built-in tool that allows you to create an automatic backup plan of specific files on computers. Select your external hard drive "Removable disk" and click "OK" to continue. Click "Advanced Settings", you can set how often to save copies of your files by minutes, hours, or daily.
Compared to Backup and Restore and File History, Windows backup software like EaseUS Todo Backup is easier for beginners to back up everything on their computers to an external hard drive. Specific individual files, whole hard drive partition, or even the OS and applications, can all be backed up automatically.
Here, EaseUS backup software offers the scheduled backup option to help you automatically backup files to an external hard drive:. Prerequisite: Connect the external hard drive connected to the computer all the time. Step 1. You can choose to create a daily backup, weekly backup, month backup or only backup changed files with incremental backup.
Support email notification. It will tell you the final result or any error message during the process. Support compressing your backup. If your file is very large or you have many files or folders, you can consider compressing the image file to save disk space. Connect your external hard drive with computer and make sure it can be accessible. Also, you can type a new task name in the box if you want to distinguish from other backups.
Click the folder shaped button , and then select the connected external disk to store file backup image. When you are ready, click " Start Backup " to back up files to the selected external hard drive. If you want to backup files based on a specific event, such as system startup, you can use the "Event triggers" schedule mode available in paid versions.
For this backup schedule, you have 4 choices, including system startup, system shutdown, user logon, user logoff. If you only want to backup changed files per day , you can combine general settings and advanced settings, such as daily incremental backup. It has 5 choices according to your backup type and you can select the suitable one to delete backup files. Upgrade to higher editions to enjoy this feature.
Now, you can disconnect your external hard drive and put it in a safe location. If you replace your computer with a new one, you can also connect the external hard drive and restore files.
If a manual or scheduled backup is not run, new or changed files are not saved or archived. There are many ways to back up a hard drive.
For instance, you can copy data from one drive to another, and that would be, for all intents and purposes, considered a backup.
Likewise, you can store a copy of your data online or in the cloud, and that, too, is a type of backup. Finally, if you save important files to a USB drive, that would also be a backup, although on a limited scale. As you can see, there are many types of backups. Still, some methods or processes considered to be backups actually are not.
For instance, if you use an application from a cloud storage solution , such as Google Drive or Dropbox, to synchronize files in a specific folder with your cloud account, that would not be considered a true backup. Now, it is easy to think of synchronized files saved in an online storage account as a cloud backup — after all, you are storing the files off-site and on an external server. Nevertheless, there is only one version of the files.
As soon as you update a file in the synchronized folder, the file on the cloud storage site changes as well. Because synchronization updates files both on the computer and on the cloud storage site, you may or may not have access to a previous version of a file. Some cloud storage solutions do retain a few previous versions of files after synchronization, but many do not.
This is a significantly different approach from that of a true backup. File versions in backups do not change whenever you create a new backup — unless you overwrite and delete the previous backup with the new one.
Hence, keeping several backups simultaneously helps you revert to previous versions of files if you need to do so. Yet, countless people still fail to realize just how important it is to keep good backups and why. If time is money, then all the time spent creating data files on your computer is a tremendous waste of money if you ever lose them — not to mention the wasted effort and lost productivity.
When you lose important documents and files, expenditures in terms of time and effort literally double because of the need to create the lost data from scratch. Unless you have a backup. A good backup strategy can save you a tremendous amount of time, effort and ultimately money. Nothing lasts forever, and the same applies to computer hardware — especially hard drives.
In many computers, the hard drive is the only mechanical device in the whole system traditional hard drives have motors and platters. And just like any other mechanical device, a hard drive will fail eventually.
If your hard drive fails, there is a chance that you can recover your data. Depending on the type of drive problem such as a drive failure or deleted partitions , you may be able to use hard drive recovery tools and software or enlist a hard drive recovery service.
Needless to say, keeping backups could save you considerably if your drive does fail. Although annoying and time consuming, recreating many types of data is possible. Consider all of the photos, videos, important emails, and other personal files you have that would be impossible to replace. With some file types, a lack of a backup is just an expensive inconvenience.
With some files, though, data loss is much more personal and painful — and permanent. By now, you should be convinced of how important it is to back up your data.
However, you may be wondering what files on your computer hard drive you actually need to back up.
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