On 13/07/2019 14:48, Richardmerri wrote:

Hi Dennis... Yes indeed!! GOT IT! I had, only two weeks prior to this 'event' said to my wife 'we MUST put in place a rigorous backup process/regime'... Oh dear... Good intentions?? Thanks for the reinforcement! Kind regards... Richard.



By far the simplest approach is Backup and Sync from Google. That backs
up your hard drive in real time and saves it to the cloud (where Google
can analyse your data to its heart's content, of course). Unless you pay
for storage, you need to limit it to 5-10GB. That's enough for all my
important documents, but not enough for everything on my PC of course.
So, I'm quite selective about which directories are backed up and where
I store stuff. That provides reasonable protection against a house fire
or theft of the PC, but not against a virus that encrypts the data.

There are similar services for photos, IIRC, with unlimited storage.

Apart from that, I mirror the hard disks with RAID 1. (That's not backup
but very useful.)

I also copy all the important docs to a series of USB drives that I use
in rotation then disconnect. They provide reasonable backup against
viruses encrypting, but not fire or theft. I do this *almost* every day,
but it's not perfect.