What do I need to back up?
You will need to know what you would want/need backed up before you can know how you should best be backing up. You have the choice, there is no right or wrong choice here, but I would recommend protecting anything you may want or things you can’t re-create like; tax and business stuff, anything that you have scanned and destroyed the hard copies), things that your kids drew for you, photos of your family, videos, any old recordings that you may have, or anything that you or someone else would be upset if it was lost. If you wondering about thinks that you have bought and downloaded, like movies, music or media, you are able to re-download those later. But, if you feel like you need to back them up, you can as well. I would consolidate all your data from numerous devices onto one.
If you’re going through the trouble to rip all of your movies to your PC, make sure you back ’em up so that effort doesn’t go to waste!
It’s not necessary, it’s just convenient to have a full backup of your desktop or laptop, as explained in option two. It’s the quickest and easiest way to restore the operating system, data and all the other things you had, in the event your hard drive dies or you a malware attack. This is commonly referred to as the disaster recovery, it will require a boot disc or flash drive that was created by the backup/recovery software. Without that backup you will have to restoring everything from scratch.
