What to back up
Your priority should be to backup your most important files as well as those that are difficult to recreate. An example of most important to least important:
- Your personal files
Documents, spreadsheets, email, calendar appointments, financial data, family photos, anything that you made that has importance to you. These are clearly the most important as they may be irreplaceable.
- Your personal settings
This includes changes you may have made to colors, backgrounds, screen resolution and mouse settings on your desktop. This also includes application preferences, such as settings for LibreOffice, your music player, and your email program. These are replaceable, but may take a while to recreate.
- System settings
Most people never change the settings that are created during installation. If you do customize your system, you may wish to backup these settings.
- Installed software (and everything else).
Such software can usually be restored by reinstalling it.
In general, you will want to backup files that are irreplaceable and files that require a great time investment to replace without a backup. If things are easy to replace, on the other hand, you may not want to use up disk space by having backups of them.
More About
- Back up your important files — Why, what, where and how of backups.