How Do You Backup Files on Your Computer (4 Steps)

Backing up files on your computer is essential

For many reasons, you may want to backup files on your computer, especially the important files. Backing up files is more important than ever now. Many users do not take it seriously. Some of them are under the illusion that their PC won’t break, and some of them think backing up files on computer is too difficult. Thereby, they do nothing about backup. However, when an accident happens and their files are lost, they always regret why they did not backup their stuff.

Many accidents can cause data loss, such as hard drive failure, system crash, and virus attack. You may lose the important data that you are going to deliver to your boss right now or lose the data that records the competitors’ important information under these conditions. The data loss may bring a big damage. So, backing up files on your computer is essential for you.

Tools you need to backup files in Windows 11/10/8/7

How can I back up my computer? Windows has a built-in backup tool named File History, and you can use it to backup files and folders step by step. However, it doesn’t support to backup single files on your computer and the messy steps will make you crazy. Is there a way that can backup files more easily?

Here we highly recommend free backup software AOMEI Backupper, which supports backing up specific files or folders and provides you with two helpful ways in the following. You are allowed to choose any files or folders on your computer to be backed up. The intuitive interface makes the backup task a piece of the cake.

• File Backup: It allows you to backup files to different storage devices, such as, external dirve, USB, network drive, NAS  or cloud drive like Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and make it run automatically, such as, daily, weekly, and monthly.  
• Cloud Bacup: If you have an AOMEI account, it's suggested to backup files to AOMEI Cloud, a cloud drive developed by AOMEI Tech, and you can enjoy 1TB of free cloud storage in 15 days. The process is automatic and you don't need to install any desktop application.

How to backup important files on my computer

Free download AOMEI Backupper and learn how to backup your files with AOMEI Backupper below. Here take File Backup as an example to show you the steps:

Step 1. Install and run AOMEI Backupper Standard. Click File Backup under the Backup tab.

Step 2. Here you can set a Task Name for this backup image. Click Add File or Add Folder according to your needs. 

Step 3. Then, select a destination place to store the backup image. You can backup files to another local space, or backup files to external hard drive like a USB flash drive, an HDD or SSD, etc. You can even backup files to NAS (network attached storage) or cloud storage.

Step 4. After selecting the destination path, you can click Start Backup to launch the progress.

👍 Useful features:

If you want to get an easier way to backup files on your computer, you can set up more for your backup.

Click Schedule Backup, and it will pop out a window where you can choose the daily, weekly, or monthly mode to automatically backup your files.

Click Backup Scheme, and you can choose incremental backup or differential backup under Backup Method. They will help to backup only changed files instead of all files you've chosen when the backup task runs again, thus saving disk space and backup time. You may upgrade to advanced versions to enjoy differential backup.

How do you backup files on your computer? This article gives you the easiest and simplest way: backup files with AOMEI Backupper. As you see, you can use it to backup not only files on your computer. You can use this freeware to backup Windows operating system (including Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10/11) or backup external hard drive, etc. Try it now to discover more!