Backing up your data is essential. With the rise of Ransomware and similar tools which can encrypt your data, unless you're prepared to pay the ransom, your files are lost forever. Backup your system partition, along with your most important files and the easiest way around a Ransomware situation is to simply wipe your drive and restore your data.

But, you need a backup/restore tool and preferably one that ships with a recoverable media builder. One such option is Paragon's Backup & Recovery 17 Free which, as its name implies, is a free version of the commercial tool from the same company.

Backing up your data is relatively easy and is wizard-driven. After choosing the drive or files you'd like to back up, select the archive destination which can be a local or network drive, a disc or another external device. Unfortnately, with the Free edition, there's no facility to backup to the cloud, so you can only store your files offline.

What is included is a comprehensive scheduler, meaning your backup job can be automatically run at system startup, logon, daily, weekly or monthly.

Also included is a a File Transfer module, which enables you to store files from another location, such as a network drive. You can simply choose the individual files and folders you want to migrate and the destination and Backup & Recovery will do the rest.

Restoring data from backups is easy. You can either restore an entire drive backup, your individual files and folders or use the supplied media recovery tool to create a bootable recovery disc which you can use to restore when you can't get back in to your computer.

Amazing, the Free version now includes incremental/differential backup support, which is ideal if you're backing up a lot of data each day. It means the system doesn't need to backup files which were unchanged since the last backup, saving a lot of time.