Backing up your data is critical and besides doing a manual copy and paste of your data from all the various locations, you can program Cobian Backup on what to backup and how to backup. Once it’s programed the rest is easy. You can have it on a schedule but you need to ensure your computer has the external drive plugged in at that time, but also make sure you unplug it when done and swap drives if you have more than one.
*IMPORTANT*
NEVER leave the hard drive plugged in while you are working. If you download an encryption virus by accident, you’ll not only lose all your data on your computer, but all your backup will be gone too. The virus encrypts your data and holds it ransom. Your only hope is having a current backup that was not attached to your computer at the time of the infection or paying the large ransom which only encourages these thieves to keep doing it.
If your backup is scheduled you don’t need to do anything else but ensure it’s plugged in at the scheduled times. If you’re doing a manual backup, below is the instructions. We are only showing you how to run the backup, not how to configure it or a detailed explanation of the entire program. Those will be in future tips.
Quick method:
- Plug in external hard drive
- Right click Cobian Backup icon down by your time (image above)
- Click “Run all tasks now” (Assuming you only have one task, a.k.a. one backup job)
- Click to put a checkmark on “Shutdown the computer when done”, if you want it to do so. (image above)
- Click OK
- Wait for the backup to finish. it will pop up when done. You can tell it’s still working by the icon. It looks different when running, the exact appearance depends on the version of Cobian backup you are using. Version 11 looks like it’s spinning.
The detailed method: (for those of you than crave more detail)
- Plug in the external hard drive
- Double click to open Cobian Backup so you can see the screen as per the image above.
- You most likely have only one backup task (I have two above). It will be named differently most likely depending on how you name it or whoever set it up for you. When I setup my clients, I call it “Daily Backup” usually.
- Click on the backup task “Daily Backup” or whatever it’s called.
- Click on the single blue arrow above that (Circled red in picture above) to run that task. If you click the double blue arrow it will run all tasks, which means if you have more than one task (backup job) it will run all of them.
You can see in my image above, I have one full backup and one without videos for when I want to do a quick backup and exclude videos that normally don’t change. You can tell by the size I have lots of videos or a few large videos. - After clicking the blue arrow, you can click OK and wait for the backup to finish. Put a checkmark on “Shutdown the computer when done” only if you want it to do so.
- In this detailed view, you can see the progress bars at the bottom right corner (in the image above) and it shows you the progress of each file going to 100% and the overall progress slowly moving to 100%. When it’s completely done both counters go back to 0%. (By default there is no percentage unless you or your tech set it up to show the % sign)
If you want to know how to do a basic configuration of Cobian Backup, we will show you in a future tip.