Guru, what’s your backup plan?

Kevin Hayles, Bridgend

AWhen GaGu’s actions are eventually discovered, he has a few potential options; escape to one of his Cayman Islands holdings; retreat to the bunker beneath Guru Towers; annihilation of all of his enemies; gruesome John Travolta face swap. It’ll all be fine. Unless you mean in the digital sense, which you probably do. Forget Guru said anything.

Guru’s primary archives, and OS-mandated mirrors of his hard drives, are stored on a lockable 2TB Buffalo MiniStation Extreme NFC drive (£140), ExFAT formatted so that any old computer can access it. Nightly, these get transferred to Guru’s NAS, a £485 Synology DS416 with four bays fully loaded with 32TB storage, much of which is dedicated to media files and such. Now and then a second drive is filled with backups, and left disconnected from any devices in case a covert government organisation plants another bit of snooping software on one of GaGu’s machines.

Making the most of the Cloud is important, too. GaGu’s phone, for example, uploads his snaps both to Google Photos and to his Plex server, giving him two copies should his handset get crushed under an irate farmer’s tractor again. Critical files from local computers – future writings, world domination plans, meticulously researched dirt on T3 editors – are entrusted to Backblaze’s Cloud backup service, which stores ‘unlimited’ data for $50 (around £39) per year.

If you’re only keeping a limited number of files, you may even be fine with the free tiers of OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox, whichs hook into a folder and mirror your files online and, if you install on multiple computers, between your machines.

You could go even madder than GaGu’s already-overkill plan, but three copies in three distinct places should be enough to keep any file safe. Even if you keep one copy away from your main PC, you’re far more covered than someone who doesn’t back up at all.