One of the most important but often neglected tasks on an any PC is to ensure that a regular backup of important data is made.
If your PC develops a problem which cannot be fixed, especially if it affects the hard disk drive (HDD) you could lose any data on it which is not backed up elsewhere. This could include valuable and perhaps irreplaceable family photos and videos, music and documents.
I would strongly recommend purchasing an external USB HDD in order to perform regular backups. These are fairly inexpensive items (around £50 for a 1 tera-byte drive at the time of writing).
If you would like to backup your data and need help, then please contact me and I will be happy to assist.
Windows has its own backup and restore tool which is fairly straightforward to use. I would recommend a weekly backup. All you need to do once the backup schedule is in place is to remember to connect the external drive to your PC in order that the backup can complete successfully. If you forget, or the PC is not switched on at the allotted time, then don't worry as Windows will recognise that the backup has been missed and will attempt to carry it out when it is next switched on. You only need to remember to plug the drive in before turning on the PC.
An alternative and perhaps additional means of backup would be to copy your important data to one of the many cloud services that are available. The popular ones are Google Drive, Microsoft Onedrive, Apple iCloud and Dropbox.
There have been recent incidents of people's cloud storage accounts being hacked and their data published. The risk of this happening is very slim, but obviously if you are worried then either don't use them or don't upload anything that you wouldn't want anyone else to see. I personally think cloud storage is great for backing up data that if lost couldn't be replaced and would be greatly missed. Even if you've taken the time and trouble to back up your most cherished pictures and videos to an external HDD, there are obvious scenarios where you could lose both the original and the backup. If the data were backed up in the cloud, you would still be able to retrieve it.