COVID-19 Safely and Effectively Work from Home Backup and Recovery Plan

"What is the best backup method if I work from home? I found many backup plans on the Internet, and it's hard for me to make a decision."

The global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) finally broke out. Factories are shut down, restaurants are closed, classes are suspended, but companies have to survive. The most guaranteed way to stay unaffected and keep business continuity is to live at home, study at home, work at home and play at home.

A Portable OS Is One of The Remote Work Must Haves

For global employees, most of whom are starting to work remotely for the first time. They need to prepare for a while to set up a cozy home office to keep productive. For example, some essentials include a computer or a separate mobile, a copy of business-critical data, a collaboration app, the Office suite, and a communicating system. Of course, how to work from home effectively and efficiently is of great concern to both employees and employers. Here, you may have heard of the most recommended working from home tips and strategies.

Use original company toolbox, including OS
Build a working computer that runs smooth and fast
Install a web conferencing app like Zoom to receive meeting calls
Keep every working material intact and prepare for moving to the company office

Sounds impossible to work with the original company operating system and installed software? Not at all. With Qiling Backup, the reputable third-party backup and recovery software on the market, you can easily carry the OS home, without reinstalling a Windows operating system from scratch, which is likely to exceed your capability to do so.

Guide: How to Create A Portable Windows 10/8/7

To create a portable Windows 10/8/7 operating system means that you put Windows on a USB flash drive. By creating a portable copy of Windows in the office and then booting to that USB drive on your home computer, you will work with your familiar OS environment, applications, preferences, and password. Everything is small and light to fit in your pocket. Now download Qiling Windows backup software and follow the steps to create a portable Windows OS on your own.

Free Download

Step 1. Launch Qiling Backup. Click "System Clone" in the tools page.

Step 2. On the "System clone" window, the software will choose the system partition and boot partition by default. Click "Next".

Tick "Sector by sector clone" option, it will clone all sectors from the source disk to the destination disk including your system data.

Step 3. Just Choose the USB drive as the destination disk.

Step 4. Preview the disk layout to confirm the settings of the source and destination disk. Click "Proceed". The software will start immediately cloning the default partitions of your desktop/laptop to the USB drive. After the cloning process is over, you can safely plug the USB drive out.

Tick Optimize for SSD, it will optimize the new SSD performance.

Step 5. To boot the cloned system from the USB drive on other Windows devices, just connect the drive to the device. After the connection, wait for the computer configuring system settings and you will finally arrive at the desktop screen that's exactly the same with that of the cloned system.

Put the "username" and "password" of the cloned system. You should now successfully enter the cloned system.

Data Backup Is The Other Remote Work Must Haves

Working with the original computer OS and applications would greatly save your time from reinstalling many essentials and getting accustomed to the new computer configuration, which improves work efficiency to some degree. After setting up a computer you're familiar with, you must take measure to fully protect all your working-from-home materials, including confidential business data, emails, documents, contracts, client information, and some extremely large files that are going to take quite a long time to transfer from your home computer to the company's.

Throughout the days of working at home, you can use Qiling Backup to set up an automatic backup schedule and let it intelligently back up your computer data.

Free Download

Benefits of Creating Backups with Qiling Backup

Multiple backup options available: disk/partition backup, file backup, system backup, and email backup.
Smart backup enabled: a default backup plan that takes effect every half an hour.
Customize a backup schedule: one-time backup, daily, weekly, monthly, or upon an event.
Efficient backup plans: full backup, differential backup, and incremental backup.
Remote backup plans: save your backup copy to Cloud services, including OneDrive, GoogleDrive, and DropBox.
Image-reserve strategy: backup as many as you like but takes less disk space than the backup image should be.
Enable backup encryption: use confidential passwords to secure the backup files you created.

Guide: How to Create An Incremental Backup

By viewing full backup vs differential backup vs incremental backup, the last incremental backup plan is featured with the fastest backup speed but the least disk space occupation. Considering the fact that your home computer is usually with small SSD or not so large HDD, the incremental backup plan suits you the best. Since incremental backup is supposed to back up only files that have changed, you'll first need to create a full backup and then start the incremental backup plan.

Step 1. Open Qiling Backup and select "File backup".

You may have a large amount of vital data to be protected as time goes on, such as documents, pictures, music, and videos, etc. It is always a good habit to have a backup on a regular basis.

Step 2. Select the files that you want to back up.

If you just want to back up one or some specific file types from one folder, the option at the top right corner can help you exclude other files.

Step 3. Select a destination to save your backup file.

You'd better create the backup file in some other storage media or in some other drive. If not, there may be a risk of the backup file getting corrupted or destroyed.

Step 4. Click "Schedule" to create an automatic incremental backup.

For example, if you want to back up these files every Sunday, select "Weekly", and select "Sun". Then, set the backup method as Incremental.

Our software will start with a full backup for the first time. After that, it will execute a backup task for only changed files every Sunday.

Notice:

Here's a warm tip for you. Since it's the first-time backup for creating a full backup image, the process normally takes longer as it needs to image all selected files. Have a little rest and wait patiently.

If you have enough space, you can also select the "Appoint weekly first backup as Full" option. This option enables you to take a full backup and an incremental backup at the same time. But it takes a lot of disk space.

Step 5. Click "Save" or click "Proceed" to execute the full back up.

Once done, it will automatically execute an incremental backup on a set day.

When you return to the company someday, you don't have to copy everything from home and take time to transfer it to the office computer. Use the one-click "Recovery" to restore all the backup. It costs Qiling Backup like a minute for a full recovery.

How to Upgrade Hard Drive Easily at Home

How long has your laptop been used? Is it able to support your work smoothly at home? Don't have extra money to buy a new computer? Is it too old or too small? Why not take a close look at your computer hard drive?

The work-from-home policy puts quite a large group of employees into a dilemma because they don't have an appropriately configured computer at hand. All they have is an over 5-year-old laptop that currently runs like a turtle. Believe me, it's not the time to give up the computer right now. Try some of the computer optimization tips here, and you may build up a brand new computer by yourself.

Reinstall operating system
Clear up junk files and useless extremely large files.
Resize a partition, particularly to increase the system C drive.

Though not 100% effective, following the tips to clean up and rearrange the disk space on your computer hard drive usually speeds up the computer a little. In addition, you can consider spending some money on a new hard drive. As long as your operating system is stable enough, you can try to clone the old hard drive along with the operating system, programs, and settings to a new hard drive that will apparently improve the computer performance.

Besides the rich-featured backup and recovery plans, Qiling Backup also has a highlighted disk cloning feature that allows you to replace an old, small, or failed hard drive, and transfer OS from HDD to SSD as easily as you imagine. By cloning, you can set up an identical new hard drive as the original one and instantly put it into use.

Free Download

Guide: How to Clone Hard Drive With Qiling Backup

If the original hard disk contains the system partition, please tick "Shut down the computer when the operation completed" option. The software will shut down automatically the computer when the clone completed.
Remove either the source disk or destination disk from the computer so that the computer can boot normally when the source disk contains boot partition.
If you want to boot from the destination disk, we recommend you change the boot order in BIOS.
If the computer fails to boot from the destination disk after the clone, we suggest you clone the source disk to another disk with the same HDD interface.
If you choose to clone a hidden partition, the cloned one will be unhidden.
The large hard drive can be cloned to small hard drive as long as the capacity of destination hard drive is equal to or larger than the used space of the original hard drive.

Step 1. Launch Qiling Backup and click "Clone".

Step 2. Select a source disk/partition you want to clone. Click "Next".

Step 3. Select a destination disk/partition. Under "Advanced options", tick the option "Optimize for SSD" or "Sector by sector clone" when it's necessary. Click "Next".

Step 4. Preview the disk layout and then click "Proceed" to execute the disk/partition cloning with Qiling Backup.

It's Time to Implement The Backup and Recovery Plan for Working from Home

It seems that the epidemic COVID-19 will last for some days. Let's be positive and unit together to fight the outbreak. Safely stay at home, and productively work from home.

Qiling backup and recovery plans will ensure a smooth transition from working in the company to remotely working from home. If everyone starts to implement the data protection and disaster recovery plan, our business will undoubtedly survive the rough year.