Slow recovery Embrace the personal cloud Backing up to the cloud can incur an expense, but it will also add another layer of protection.

The idea of the personal cloud is increasingly taking hold. For consumers, it usually comes in the form of a hard drive you connect to your router.

Such hardware is typically straightforward to set up, and subsequently enables you to access the content stored on it from any device, wherever you happen to have an internet connection.

Conceptually, it’s not a million miles away from iCloud Drive, although personal cloud devices tend to be geared towards dumping huge amounts of content on to multi-terabyte drives. But like iCloud Drive, they are not a substitute for backups. Personal cloud hardware of this sort is still on-site, meaning key files should still be backed up to the likes of Backblaze – and to another local drive, too. Storing content on a personal cloud device is really convenient and flexible for access, but should be used with other backup options.