re: Backing Up Important Files Etc.

I've used several different backup packages over the years.  My favorite was Crashplan but they decided to move away from consumer backups and target their services (and pricing) to small business.   You can still use it for personal use but the price was pretty high the last time I looked into it.  Their software was completely unobtrusive and super easy to understand but put a little dot next to every folder and file that was flagged for backup so you could easily see what was and wasn't in your backup set.  The dot was green when the file had been backup up and yellow if it had been changed since the time it was last backed up.  The backups were in the cloud but another great feature (that was actually free)  was that you could designate any other computer anywhere in the world as a backup location.  This allowed you to backup on a friend's or family member's computer as an extra backup.   The computer could be sitting in the next room or across the country.    BTW, backing up to multiple locations is important.  

Now I am using Acronis Cyber Protect.  It provides cloud backups but  you can also use local drives, including USB or flash drives.  One thing that sets it apart from the others I have used is that you can create drive image backups.  You can set up image imcremental backups to only send affected  sectors to minimize how much data has to be sent and you can control how often it creates a new complete image.    These image backups give you a complete backup of the entire hard drive so if one crashes, you can restore the image to a new drive and recover the entire computer, operating system and all.  That could be a little slow from the cloud so I use a NAS for that and only backup certain directories to the cloud.  Another feature of Acronis is that it also monitors for and blocks activity that looks like ransomware attacks.  It also comes with several utilities for disk management, including a tool to migrate a disk image to a new hard drive and a tool to manage and change partition sizes on a physical drive.  The one downside is that the software can be a little complex to understand at times so might not be the best option for someone who wants a complete turnkey solution.