Backups are one of the least interesting and most important things to do on computers. What you have to identify is the things that are important to you that you would not like to loose. For instance: accounting data, family pictures, music downloads that took how many hours to download and maybe even pay for, work files that you aren't getting paid extra for, but don't want to do twice.  There are different kinds of backups depending on what you are trying to accomplish.  The most basic backup of just coping files from one computer to another or to a CD. This puts your info in two places, drastically reducing the chance of a loss. But the biggest problem is that it's boring, so you might do it once, but once a week, once a month... not likely.  So ideally a backup should be mostly passive. By that I mean you go through the pain to set it up once and then it just does it for you. So how do you do this? There are a number of ways, but they all can be a little complicated until you've installed them and figured them out. The advantage of one way verses another is usually a matter of opinion. The difference here is that anything I talk about or recommend, I've tried and / or used. So I can set them up, explain them to you, and give you some instruction on how to check that it worked (and is working).  So a quick run down of what you could (should) do. 

 

If you have one computer (or portable), the easiest thing to do is get a USB hard drive or thumb drive. I like the hard drives because they are much bigger. In computers bigger is almost always better. It's always better to have more space then you need, then not enough.  You just plug these into the usb port and introduce them to the computer. Once introduced, then it's a quick plugin and you have an external drive that you can copy the data off the main computers hard drive to another hard drive for easy redundancy.  Some of these drives come with backup software, but if you're not willing to take the time to learn it, backup, and then restore, you're taking a chance that it's not going to work when you need it the most. It's actually better to get an inexpensive utility to set the backup parameter up on and then let it do its stuff.