How to Back Up Your Windows 10 PC to an External Hard Drive

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In this tutorial we're going to look at how to backup your Windows 10 PC to an external hard drive

There are several different ways you can back up your PC. You can use a cloud backup or you can buy some the spokes software like a Cronus for your pc but also Microsoft includes some built-in backup software within Windows 10 and that's what I'm going to show you how to use today.

I currently have a 250GB external and it is just plugged into the front of my computer, so these are the steps to backup Windows 10 Computer.

1. Go to Start
2. Settings
3. Updates
4. Security Within
5. At the top of the screen click Add Drive

The PC will now search for any drives that are plugged in that can be used for backup

As you can see in this video it's found my external hard drive here so i want to click on that drive and it will bring up a screen with more options: Look at the overview where it shows that it has not been backed up and it gives the option to back up now.

I’m going to now look at the settings for automatic backups. The default is to back up your files every hour which may be a little overkill for most PCs. You can even back up every 10 minutes. I would recommend that you back up daily. Again it's up to you in your circumstances.

You will then come to a section that you can choose how long to keep your backups. The default is forever. You are going to be limited to how big your external hard drive space is so if you just want a backup of your data in case your house or office burns down then you know you can select one month. If you've got a business and you got compliance and you need to keep data then you need to buy a big hard drive and select forever or even one or two years.

The folders that I’m going to back up all my downloads, favorites, my documents, my pictures, my camera, my videos so it is backing up pretty much everything. The one recommendation I will give here is if you are using Microsoft Office One Drive, I wouldn't include that in the back up options. The nature of one drive is it’s cloud-based storage so you don't need to duplicate the back-up.

So you click on remove One Drive then at the bottom you can exclude some folders. You might want to exclude a folder for example it might be an application you might not need it backed up for whatever reason. You can go in there and you can browse to any folder that you want excluded from the backup.

Once you have your settings you can either wait until the next backup interval which if we set that will be in the next hour or you can manually click backup now and the backup will start.

So that is how to backup your Windows 10 PC to an external hard drive and if you got a problem with this time struggling with any information then please contact us will be happy to help.

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