Back Up Windows 11 for Free - and What Only Looks Like a Backup

If your files exist in exactly one place, you do not have a backup - you have a single point of failure with your holiday photos on it.

The good news is that Windows already includes most of what you need and you are probably not using it.

The rest costs nothing but a spare drive and about twenty minutes.

Start here, in order, and stop whenever you have had enough - even step one puts you ahead of most people.

What Actually Counts as a Backup

The rule people who do this for a living use is called 3-2-1, and it is less complicated than it sounds.

Three copies of anything you care about. On two different kinds of storage. With one of them somewhere else entirely.

The reason for the third copy is not paranoia about drives failing. It is that fires, floods, burglaries and spilled drinks take everything in one room at once, and two drives in the same drawer are one accident.

The Things That Feel Like Backups and Are Not

A second folder on the same PC. The drive dies, both copies go. This is the most common non-backup there is.

The external drive you carry around. It is a copy, which is better than nothing, but it lives the roughest life of any drive you own and it is usually in the same bag as the laptop.

OneDrive, Dropbox or Google Drive on their own. Sync is not backup - delete a file and it deletes everywhere, and ransomware that encrypts your folder will happily encrypt the cloud copy too.

Two drives in one enclosure. Mirroring protects you from one drive dying. It does nothing about deleting the wrong folder, which is how most people actually lose files.

Turn On the Backup You Already Have

File History ships with Windows, costs nothing, and copies your documents, pictures, desktop and downloads to an external drive on a schedule.

Plug in a drive you can leave connected, then work through this once.

• Open Control Panel, then File History. It is not in the Settings app, which is why most people never find it.
• Pick your external drive and click Turn on.
• Open Advanced settings and set how often it runs and how long it keeps old versions. Hourly and forever are fine if the drive is big enough.
• Check what is actually included. File History covers your user folders, so anything living elsewhere - a projects folder on a second drive, say - has to be added to a Library first or it is silently skipped.
• Leave the drive plugged in. A backup that only runs when you remember to connect something is not a schedule, it is a hobby.

What the Windows Backup App Does and Does Not Do

Windows 11 also has an app simply called Windows Backup, and it is easy to mistake for the whole job.

It copies selected folders, your settings, your installed app list and your saved credentials into OneDrive, which makes setting up a new PC much less painful.

What it is not is a backup of your data, because the free OneDrive allowance is 5GB and one phone's worth of photos eats that before lunch. Treat it as a convenience feature, not as step one.

Make a Full Disk Image

File History saves your files. A disk image saves the whole machine - Windows, your programs, your settings, your licences, the lot - as one file you can pour back onto a replacement drive.

The difference shows up on the worst day. Restoring files means reinstalling Windows and every application first; restoring an image means you are working again in an hour.

Clonezilla does this for free and does it properly. It runs from a USB stick rather than from inside Windows, which is exactly why it can copy a drive that Windows is not currently using.

You will need Rufus to write the Clonezilla ISO to that stick, and a second drive with room for the image.

Windows does still have its own image tool buried in Control Panel, and we have a step-by-step walkthrough of the built-in system image tool if you would rather use what is already there.

Worth knowing before you do: Microsoft deprecated that tool years ago and stopped developing it, which is why a maintained imager is the more durable choice for a backup you intend to rely on.

The Copy That Lives Somewhere Else

This is the step everybody skips, and it is the one that turns a pile of copies into an actual backup.

Cloud storage is the easy version. Pick a paid tier big enough for the things you would genuinely miss, and let it run.

The unglamorous version works just as well and costs less. Buy a second drive, copy everything onto it, and leave it at a relative's house or in a desk drawer at work, swapping it every few months.

If most of what you are protecting is films and music, stop here and read how to back up a media library instead - a library is too big for cloud storage and needs a mirror rather than a version history.

If you are choosing that drive now, our guide on which drive to buy for the job covers what matters and what is marketing.

Test the Restore, Once

A backup you have never restored from is not a backup. It is a hope with a schedule attached.

Do the small version today: pick one file, delete it, and get it back from File History. That is five minutes and it tells you the whole chain works.

Do the big version once a year: boot from your Windows recovery drive and confirm it can see the backup drive. Finding out it cannot is the sort of thing you want to discover on a Sunday afternoon, not on the day the disk dies.

While you are at it, check the backup drive's health with its maker's own utility. A failing backup drive is a special kind of unfair.

Quick questions

Two minutes on File History today beats a perfect backup plan you never got round to.

Everything else worth having sits on our HDD, SSD and USB tools page.

Grab Clonezilla when you are ready for the full image, or leave a comment telling us what saved you the last time something died.