Backing up your pictures and other files

From time to time a friend comes to me with a broken computer.  What really upsets them more than the computer is that they may have lost all the pictures that they have no other backups for.  While I have been pretty successful at recovering files for people in the past, this is gong to get harder as time goes on.  Data recovery is inherently insecure and as we make things more secure to protect ourselves when things fail they will fail closed (i.e. better lost than stolen).  The only option is backups.  If your not backing things up start today.

If you don't have time to read this post:
Install google photos desktop https://photos.google.com/apps - Free unlimited storage up to 16 megapixel and videos up to 1080p (the maximum resolution for average smartphone).  Note: choose the high quality unlimited storage option or you may use up all your google drive and gmail storage.

What makes a good backup:
1. Automatic
2. Reliable
3. Offsite (a.k.a cloud)

What makes a great backup:
1. Incremental
2. Compressed
3. Real time (shadow copy)

What do you need to backup:
Focus on the data not the applications.  You can reinstall Microsoft Office but there is no where you can get another copy of a paper you wrote.  Pictures and home videos tend to be the most unique and irreplaceable things (if you loose music you bought from iTunes you can re-downloaded it). Your pictures and documents are generally in easy to find locations (c:\users\name\My Pictures, ...\My Documents).   Email archives are not easy to find.  If you want to backup your email you need to google "backup name-of-your-email-app".  Note if you use gmail then there are years worth of emails in the cloud and you probably don't need to worry about it.

Is there a service I can pay for to make this simple?
yes.  Use crashplan ($60/yr) or Carbonite ($42/yr) or one of many others http://lifehacker.com/five-best-online-backup-services-1006345049

What can I do on the cheep?
We have several laptops in our family so I share My Pictures folder as read/write on our home network (i.e. homegroup) and use FreeFileSync to sync the two computers.  I also use google photos to create another backup.  Why not it's free and it also gives you the ability to access all your pictures for all time strait from your smartphone without using all the storage on your phone.  We also use google music because you can backup all your mp3s to the cloud and stream them to any device without using any space on your phone.  For documents I use onedrive mainly because you can get allot of free storage (I have 45 Gig) and I don't need it for anything else (If you use google drive and gmail they use the same storage pool so one takes from the other).  They key thing for onedrive or dropbox or google drive is make it your default location to create new document and move all your existing documents into it (assuming they will fit).

Another cheep option is an external USB drive (you can get a 1TB for $55 on amazon).  With an external drive I would recommend a real backup solution (still free) cobian backup.  Plug in the external USB and you can start doing compressed incremental backups of your whole user directory.  External USB has the advantage of being fast, complete, and incremental.  Incremental means you have many snapshots of files in time.  If a file gets corrupted or infected or if you made a mistake editing it you can step back in time until you find a good version.  The downside of USB is it is not automatic, because you have to attach the drive every time you want to do a backup.  A more serious issue is it is not offsite.  If your house burns up and your laptop and USB drive are in the same place they are both gone.  Note a fireproof safe will not save a USB drive.   A USB drive is more sensitive to heat than paper you can't make it fireproof.

A slightly more expensive option (~$150+) to a simple USB drive is a NAS (Network Attached Storage).  There are PC versions of NAS and Apple makes a time capsule which is very popular.  NAS solves the automatic issue because it's always on and available on your home network but it is still not offsite.  If your house burns down your NAS burns up with your laptop you are out of luck.

Hopefully this was helpful.  Please post any comments or questions...

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Photos
http://lifehacker.com/theres-no-excuse-for-not-backing-up-your-computer-do-1547987206
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/networking-home-computers-running-different-windows#networking-home-computers-running-different-windows=windows-7