If your hard drive failed now what would you do? That's right, use the backup hard drive and copy all your data back to a new disk.

Backing up your music, pictures, videos, documents, and settings needn't be difficult, or even expensive in software costs. SyncToy can handle everyday backups of your data. It's a powertoy from Microsoft for XP, with a small download at 971KB (about 1.3MB when installed). What's more, its easy to set up, follow this guide to set-up automatic backups of your all important data.

You can download SyncToy here. External USB hard drives can be had for under £50 nowadays in PC World-type shops, if you have a lot of data 500GB drives are also under £100.

Install SyncToy from the link above, and format the hard drive if it hasn't already been done (Google search results for formatting hard drives can be found here).

You have to set up "Folder Pairs", two folders you wish to copy. SyncToy offers many options in how to copy data between these two files automatically. The options are:

• Synchronise copies files both ways when they are created or changed. Could cause confusion with backups.

• Echo copies new and changed data to the right file from the left, it also deletes files that no longer exist in the left folder. This is the option I use for backing up my data.

• Subscribe updates files from right to left, but only updates files rather than create new files. This doesn't seem usable as a backup solution

• Contribute is similar to echo except it doesn't delete files. This is also a possible option for direct backups, as it wont delete items you may have mistakenly deleted.

• Combine copies files both ways all over the place. It seems limited for backup purposes.

From these options I feel the Echo option is most suited to backup files. Once you have chosen the file you wish to backup (for example Music), create a new file of a similar name in the backup hard drive. Then choose the Echo option, give the "Folder Pair" a name relevant to the files you are backing up and click finish. Repeat this process for any other folders you wish to backup. Most people will find that backing up their entire My Documents folder will take care of all their valued data.

Within SyncToy, there is a list of all your Folder Pairs down the left hand side, and details of the pair currently selected is shown on the right. You can preview or run a specific folder pair at any time. Previewing scans the files and decides how many files will be copied, renamed, or deleted. I don't really find this of much value, however might be interesting.

You can manually Run any of the folder pairs, by choosing the pair in the left toolbar and clicking the Run button. However, it may be more useful to run all folder pairs at once, do this by selecting All Folder Pairs and clicking Run All.

Now the folder pairs are all set up, and you have run it once (it will take a while the first time), you can schedule SyncToy to run all folder pairs at specific times of day or week. Open scheduled tasks from the control panel (Start > Settings > Control Panel, or Start > Control Panel). Double click the Add Scheduled Tasks icon, a wizard will pop up guiding you through the set-up. Find SyncToy in the applications list, if it is not there click browse then navigate to X:\Program Files\SyncToy and choose the synctoy.exe file. Next give the task a name (such as Backup), and choose a frequency when it is to be done. The next screen lets you choose a time and day etc.. Then enter you Windows username and enter the password (I will come to what to do if you don't have a password later). Select "open advance properties for this task when I click Finish" in the final window, now change the command in the Run box, add -R with a space after the command. It should now look similar to "C:\Program Files\SyncToy\SyncToy.lnk" -R. This will run all folder pairs every time the scheduled task starts.

If you don't have a password on your Windows account (I advise you to get one!), then you can leave the password fields blank, and choose to open the Advanced Properties at the end of the wizard above. At the bottom of the page there is a check-box labelled "Run only if logged on" tick this box and click OK.

Now SyncToy will backup your important data automatically, so you don't have to worry about losing any data ever again. If you lose data on your main drive, navigate to it's folder in the backup drive and copy it back manually.