Every day we are generating a lot of data as this is the core of our scientific research. But things often go wrong and data gets corrupted by viruses, a laptop get stolen, hard drives fail, or thumb drives get misplaced and days, weeks, or months of work is lost. And your research comes to a screeching halt!

A backup is a copy of your data. It is carried out to ensure that your data can be rescued in case of a problem or disaster. Backup is like an insurance policy – it must be done before the disaster happens, if it is to be of any help, so set it up today and not tomorrow.

Backup must be automatic and not an ad hoc thing you do when you remember and have the time, and this guide will help you set up an efficient and automatic backup system that will protect you against loss of data. It will help you install and configure a free backup software called Cobian. It is an easy to use and free application which can be downloaded from http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm. Once you have successfully installed Cobian, the guide will take you through configuring a backup task.