Have you ever had a Hard drive or even worse, a computer completely die with no hope of restoring your data? Hopefully, in the later case, you were able to remove the HDD and restore whatever was on it but if your drive no longer worked, whatever was on it, without resorting to a data recovery company, was probably lost forever.
So, what should you do? You could subscribe to a cloud server, pay their fee and hope they never lose your data or have a breach, exposing you to whoever compromised their systems, or you can perform your own backups on a regular basis. In addition, if your system ever requires a full wipe of whatever is on it, you will already have the tools in place to back up your data before cleaning your storage drive.
Requirements:
Knowledge of where your data exists.
Somewhere to store your data, other than a drive on your computer.
A little time and patience.
How to proceed:
If you've never created a separate folder for your data, then everything you have will be stored under "/user/(your user name)". Documents, pictures, videos, favorites( if you use Edge) will all be there. Programs won't be but if you have to restore your operating system, you might want to reconsider just reinstalling those programs after the purge. You may not want to save all those folders but at least you can access the folders you want.
You want to save those folders and their contents to an external drive, be it HDD, SATA SSD, NVMe SSD or even something as simple as a USB stick, depending on the amount of data you have. If you have two drives, even better and if one can be stored in a different building, then you are good to go. Remember - Fire, floods or any other disaster can be your enemy too.
If you do have more than one external drive, you might want to copy everything into a temp folder on your main drive, which saves you from having to copy each folder as you come to it, for each drive.
As I don't use HDDs for anything in my computer any more, which may or may not be an option for you, I use older, NVMe drives that I have replaced due to size and speed, placed in an external holder which allows file transfers much faster than transferring to a USB drive. While my USB drives are large enough, they are also very slow, taking up to a half an hour or more to transfer data. The repurposed SSDs take less than a minute for each backup (Yeah, I don't have much data, just pictures and stuff, but it's all stuff I don't want to lose).
This information is for you to use as you see fit, maybe you use the backup provided by windows, or employ a third party, the important thing to remember, is that to keep from losing it, you should have some backup system in place that you can access when needed to rebuild the data on your machine.
