[Por_sha911]

A 10 year old is far more tech savvy than most of us. You want me to talk to you like you are a 60 years old.

CD's are great for one time saving info but horribly slow for backing up an entire machine.

An external hard drive is a self contained hard drive that stores everything you need but is connected to your machine via the USB cable.

You plug it in and transfer all your document files (music, pics, checkbook, etc) onto it and unplug it and put it in a safe place. As already stated, depending how vital the data is, you want to have at least one set of backups in a place offsite in case of fire, flood, etc.

The cheapest way to backup is to copy and past using Windows Explorer (included with Windows). You can buy backup software that makes everything easy. Click a few buttons and let the software do the work.

I personally don't trust "cloud" data backup. I don't know if they've been hacked. I don't know if they are about to go belly up. Besides, backup via internet is very slow.

Finally, if you have business critical data, you may want to have software that automatically backs up your info to a second hard drive or external source automatically (like every time you hit save or even every so many minutes).