Everyday Backups: protect your documents, photos and email - 2026 edition

$9.95

Sale Sold out

Subscriber Discount Yes No

Everyday Backups (Sixth ed. 2026) helps you keep your documents, settings and emails safe and protected. Get your essential data back when things go wrong like mistakes, computer failure, theft and ransomware. Everyday Backups is about recovering things you thought were lost with the focus on documents, files and emails used by Microsoft Office programs.

Two automatic backups, running in 10 minutes. Both are free, both are already inside Windows, and both are asleep until you go and wake them. That's Chapter 1. If you read nothing else in this book, that chapter alone pays for it.

What you get

Over 260 pages of experienced advice
- Office Watch independent help & tips since 1996

Windows 11 and Windows 10
Microsoft 365, Office 2024/2021/2019/LTSC, Office 2016 and earlier Office for Windows.
Outlook backups
Registry backups
Social media accounts
AI services (ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini)
Databases
Automatic backups, scheduling.

Sixth Edition, 2026
260 pages, full color, with plenty of screenshots
PDF format: Windows, Mac, iPad, Android tablets and phones, and pretty much anything else
Linked table of contents and fast search
Instant download, yours to keep, no subscription
Independent Office help and tips since 1996

Think you're already backed up? Read this first

Three things fool almost everyone.

Windows Backup is not a backup. If you turned it on to claim free Extended Security Updates for Windows 10, what you have is a migration tool. It helps you move to a new PC. It does not keep earlier versions of your documents and it will not save you from ransomware.

OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive are sync, not backup. Delete a file, overwrite it, or let malware scramble it, and that change is copied to the cloud within seconds. Those services have lost customer files on their own, too. You need your own copy of what's up there.

Your AI chats are not saved anywhere else. Months of Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini conversations, drafts, images and uploaded files, all sitting on someone else's server behind an account that could be suspended, changed or closed. Almost nobody has a copy.

Everyday Backups explains all three in plain English, then shows you what real protection looks like.

Restoring is the part nobody writes about

Most backup advice assumes everything works. Buy this, click that, congratulations, you have a backup. There's little about getting files back and almost nothing about what to do when the restore itself goes wrong.

That's backwards. Restoring always happens at the worst possible moment. Your PC is broken, which is why you're restoring, and you're under time pressure because something important is due.

Everyday Backups gives you step by step instructions in both directions, backup and restore, from people who have done it badly and learned from it.

"Backups aren't just about recovering files after a computer breakdown. Sometimes you need an earlier version of a document, perhaps wording you cut from a draft that you now realize you need. We'll show you the options to get that back." - Peter Deegan, cofounder of Office Watch

Ransomware needs a different kind of backup

Ransomware locks you out of your documents, photos and videos, then asks for money. Here's the nasty part: it goes after your backups too. A backup drive plugged into your PC gets encrypted along with everything else, leaving you nothing to restore from.

The ransomware chapter explains how the attack actually works, why ordinary backups fail against it, and how to set up copies that survive.

Documents, pictures, videos, the lot

There's a lot on your computer that you'd hate to lose. A lot more than you'd realize. Everyday Backups will help you find and copy all those personal details.

Cloud Storage

Do you have a backup of what's on OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive etc? Those services aren't perfect and have been known to lose files. You need your own copies of what's 'up there' in the cloud.

Social Media

Facebook, Twitter/X and Instagram can have a lot of precious memories. Photos and videos from your past that are saved nowhere else.
Everyday Backups shows how to get copies of all that information and, if possible, do it automatically in the future.

AI records

Get a backup copy of your chats, images and files made saved in Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.

Dive deep into File History, the single best feature in Windows but little appreciated and even less used.

'Roll our own' - make your own backups and schedule them to run automatically including the Windows Registry and databases.

Outlook is a special case. It has large files plus settings saved in different places. We'll show you how to fully backup Outlook.

Most of the tricks we'll talk about also apply to other programs and situations, they go into Office features that can help recover lost data but are not normally included in simple 'backup' coverage.

The Everyday Backups takes a practical approach after many years of saving and restoring files. We know that restoring has to happen at the worst of times. Your computer hardware or software might not be working properly (since that's why you need to restore data in the first place) and you might be under time pressure (computer failures will delay that important task you have).

We've written a practical guide with plenty of 'step by step' instructions for both backup AND restoring files.

We'll show you how to do this with commonly available tools that you either have or can get for a low price.

Everyday Backups works for Windows 11, Windows 10 and Windows 8; any version of Microsoft Office.