My experiencxe with computers dates back to Ameiga and C64 days before internet and before we placed so much of our lives in digital form. As more and more went digital I started to see first hand what could happen if you did not ahve backups. My brother lost years of musical work due to a drive failure and ultimately gave up on music because of it. My sister recently lost the first 2 years of her childs photos and videos because of no backups. Drives WILL fail and will take everything down with them.

I'm not going to dive into comparing all the options but simply offer some quick advice based on many previous experiences. First off, the amount of actual critical files I have lost in 20 years of computer usage I could fit on a floppy disk (look that up on wikipedia). This is because very early on when floppy disks were the only real way to carry files it was so easy to break these things you had to have backups. 

So my backup system started with simple writable CDs. Tubes and tubes of them which I still have filed away somewhere. I would write everything that was very important to me to at least 2 CDs as well as my hard drive (rule of 3). This progressed to DVDs and then spare hard drives. 

There was one critical error I was very aware of and that was this was all a manual backup process which I would often neglect but having a couple of close calls I decided to put an automated system in action. 

Upon building a home server from an old PC I designed a simple batch script (text based script) that simply ran in a loop on the server checking to see if my computer was on the network. When it was detected the script would copy files in designated folders to the server drive which was then also backed up to an external drive (rule of 3). This automated system ensured backups were always current and in at least 3 different locations. I have lost a number of drives over the years, corrupt files and other mishaps but still I have the very first song I ever created, the first digital photo I ever took and the first document I ever typed.

Nowdays you have many automated backup options including Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox and many other options. All I can say is make sure you have something in place for your music projects and important irriplacable samples. Software can be downloaded but a moment in time is lost forever if you dont back it up.

This is my advice to anyone if they ask "How do I get started".