Things to do before selling a laptop: 1- Backup Your Files

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Things to do before Selling a Laptop:1 - Backup your files.

What is back up?

Back up means “Making copies of files and folders and storing them in a safe place so that one can access those files when they are needed”. The backup files can be retrieved easily if it is stored properly.

Why you should back up?

Your laptop or computer is the core of your personal and professional activities. It can help you manage your documents, pictures, music, and other media in a single place. There is possibility of losing your data due to theft, natural disasters, malware, account hacks, hard drive failure and accidental deletion and so on. The first and the foremost thing to do before selling a laptop online is to take back up of all your files.

How you should backup?

There are three kinds of backup. Let’s look these types in detail:

Bootable backup is essentially a clone wherein the data, settings and configuration can be accessed at any point in time. Thus it is important to have this kind of backup very frequently (at least once in a day).

External backup is incremental backup of your information as the data gets collated or updated to an external hard drive. Usually this backup does not happen for the whole drive but is limited to certain folders in the drive.

Cloud backup is a strategy where you data get backed up over the internet if you have your account and the data gets backed up to a distributed set of computers and hard drives ensuring sufficient redundancy. The software that does this backup might have to be downloaded from the service provider and is intelligent enough to detect what has changed and what kind of information needs to be backed up.

What kind of files you should backup?

Before selling your laptop, the very first thing you need to do is back up everything from your laptop. Depending on what you have in your computer, you need to strategize on backing your files. Strategizing means deciding on which files to have and which not to have.

The most crucial files to backup are likely your documents, pictures, music and other user files, but they are not only the files that are needed to back up. Let’s walk through some of them.

1. Documents: You must back up your complete documents folder all the time.

2. Music: You must have paid lots of money for MP3 downloads, you will likely be sad to lose them. Make sure you all include this file.

3. Photos: This is certainly a huge one, and often the files that are the most significant. If you have a bunch of pictures of your kids as they were growing up. You definitely no longer want to lose them! So ensure that you are getting all of your photos in the back up.

4. Desktop Email: In case you're utilizing Outlook or Windows Live Mail, make completely sure that you've moved down the documents from these applications.

5. Application settings: In the event that you search inside the AppData folders, you'll see indexes for every last application you're running. These settings can regularly be restored from backup so you don't need to change everything once more.  Simply look into C:\Users\Username\AppData\ to see the Local, Roaming, and LocalLow folders that contain numerous settings for your applications.

6. Virtual Machines: If you utilize virtual machines for genuine work, you ought to most likely make a backup of your virtual machines sooner or later.

7. Bookmarks: Most browsers other than Internet Explorer really make it hard to back up your bookmarks utilizing Windows Backup; however the vastly improved choice is to match up your bookmarks to the cloud.

When should you backup?

The best time is to back up your records on a consistent basis/daily if possible. To minimise the risk, it is advisable to take backups after every change that you made to data or at regular intervals. It is better to adopt automated backup to keep your documents safe without waiting to do backup manually.

Now that you have backed up all your files, the next step would be to De-activate or De-authorise installed features. To look more about this step, Refer blog