Introduction
It is always a good idea to back up your windows user profiles just in case your computer stopped working. Much better if you can store it off site and this will make restoring the system painless. In windows 7, the user profiles is stored in C:\Users\username.
How it works
Best summarize in a diagram below.
| user profile | <———-synchronize————> |external backup|
Advantages
Why should we care? There are many benefits of doing a systematically user profile backup, for instance:
- Easily restores your files, bookmarks, favorites, images,etc on a fresh windows installation.
- Automatically eradicate duplicate files.
- Clever way to update your files and avoid rewritings.
- Fast back up time.
- It costs nothing (except for the external drive) because we’ll be using Open Source app.
Item Checklist
- External harddisk, space are cheap nowadays. Get 1TB for god sake.
- Free File Sync
Steps
1 . Install Free File Sync software.
2. Connect your external drive.
3. Now launch the Free File Sync software. On the left side will be your user profile location. Click browse button and point it to your user profile.
User profile
The right side will be the location of your external back up drive. Click browse and point it to your drive.
Back up drive
4. Next click the synchronize button to start the process. For initial synchronization process, it will take quite a long time to run. For the next backup session its really quick. Well, that depends on the back up size alright.
Synchronize
and after doing some calculations, it will show the diagram below. Click start.
Start sync
5 .If you got an error dialog pop ups, most of the time it is harmless, please tick Ignore and click ignore button.
Its safe to click ignore
6. At the end of the process you will get:
Completed
Click ok and have your mind at rest now 
Summary
This guide may not be suitable for everyone. Hopefully some of you will find it useful and if you have other better method to do this, please share it on the comment box below. Thank you!
