Preparations for backing up my PC's

[huffman]

Yes I am still running Win7. Actually when I think about it, it is my primary PC. I have not backed it up since December 2023. It is about time.

I have both Macrium Reflect and AOMEI Backupper installed and updated.

My question is "Is there any preparations I need to do before making the backups"?

Thanks

 

[SIW2]

you could run disk cleanup

 

[huffman]

I found a free program called "PC Cleaner and I going to give it a try. There is a Pro version, but I am NOT sure about that.

Take car e.

 

[LordOfWar]

Run disc cleanup. Delete System Restore points to make the backup as small as possible. After done, immediately make a new System Restore point.

 

[huffman]

That free "PC Cleaner" LOL was NOT free. Before it would do anything, you had to buy it. Also was NOT that easy to uninstall. It did NOT show in my Revo Uninstaller.

[FONT=&quot]LordOfWar, the size of the backup is not all that important as it is on a 115 gb thumb drive by itselt.
I tried running "Disk Cleanup", and it did NOT seem to do anything. I will try it again.


[/FONT]

 

[Bree]

I tried running "Disk Cleanup", and it did NOT seem to do anything. I will try it again.

If it shows a 'Clean up system files' button, click on it. Alternatively run Disk Cleanup as an administrator. Either way it will list a lot more that you could clean up.

 

[Alejandro85]

I think the most important decision to make is what to backup. Don't just copy files over and call it a backup, think carefully what do you want and what that backup will be used for, what kind of disaster can you recover from with it?

Not necesarily before, but also worth considering is what schedule will you follow with it? Manual backups are nice for one-off problems or before experiments, but you will[/] forget about them eventually, so it's important to automate them (any decent backup program can do this).
Also consider what retention period you want and what rotation strategy to use.

Finally, and most important, be sure you know and test how to restore the backups. It's common to just assume they'll "just work" and you don't try them, then nasty surprises follow after a disaster. Try building a virtual machine solely from your backups and see if you can get it to a working state with all your important data. If you can't, most likely you forgot to backup something.