Having a backup of your data is extremely important.  Not having a data backup when disaster strikes can take your computer problems from bad to worse.  Imagine your hard drive crashes and you don’t have a backup of your psych paper that’s due tomorrow, all the photos of your children since they were born or the Quickbooks files for your business with a tax deadline around the corner.  Now not only do you have to replace a hard drive, but you’ve lost documents which may irreplaceable.

Luckily, there are a number of ways to get your documents backed up these days.  This post is going to go over three of the most common methods.

Manual Data Backup

A manual backup is as simple as connecting an external device such as a thumb drive or portable hard drive and saving a copy of your files on the external device.  You can do this by the drag and drop method or the copy and paste method.