A surprising number of people post on this forum about a total hard drive wipe out or loss of work through some mishap. Nobody is immune to the effects of data loss right up to the infamous case of the near total loss of the film Toy Story 2. I have also experienced the total loss of recent work when a PSU on my machine blew out (smoke and all !) taking out the whole machine and all peripherals and hard drives within it. I made the mistake of using a second hard drive within the machine to keep it backed up. So henceforth, I changed my strategy and took it all a little more seriously.

This tutorial is for Windows only just one way of doing things which has prevented me from losing anything important since that date. I have lost a hard drive since my PC blew up and I did lose a few days worth of camera photos but that was the limit to the damage. If your on linux then generally you know what your doing and if on apple then you can use the cloud if you trust it.

I would also like to add that there are a multitude of ways you can backup and anybody who wishes to propose a different or better way of doing things is welcome but this is one way to show how you can do this where you should be able to hedge against most scenarios with about 10 mins of instruction and no cost. To prevent more traumatic data loss scenarios you probably need to spend a little and get some off computer storage.

The first thing I would like to say about back ups is that it had better be easy to do once set up. Even better would be if it were to be automated but I found that setting that up to be more difficult and that if not done with some manual trigger you don't have confidence that it is truly backing up the data.

There is just two halves to this tut. One is saving files whilst you work so that you don't lose files from a bad save. The other is saving all files on your PC once finished in case a drive fails or it blows up.

The first thing I would like to say is that data storage is cheap. Well, in my view its a lot cheaper than my time to recreate something I have lost. So before you start a new map or piece of art just ensure you have ample space on your hard drive to store any copies of the WIP. If your down to your last gig then its time to back up and find some off hard drive storage to keep things on or buy a bigger drive.