What should I do about backups?
AMUHAMMAD ANWAR, LONDON
A confession, and one which will probably not surprise you if you’ve so much as brushed against Guru’s pathetically scuffed existence in the past: GaGu’s main work machine recently had a big ol’ spinning hard drive failure and (yep) he hadn’t backed up what was on it, like a flipping massive computer idiot who apparently did not want to look after three years of work. You, reader, are not an idiot. You’re clever and very attractive, and you need to make backups happen.
Guru’s forced-hand answer has been to cobble together parts from the dangerous slopes of Tech Mountain combined with Linuxbased file sharing solution OpenMediaVault to give him some network-attached space for a second copy. Do not, under any circumstances, do this. You will fall into the Linux pit because it won’t work, and somewhere along the line you’re going to either experience or do something that defies the Geneva Convention.
What you need is two additional copies of your most precious zeroes and ones, at least one of which is off-site in case your teetering edifice of tech finally leaks all of its different chemicals together and starts a fire. For that, opt for an online solution; you might spend a little on an expanded Google One subscription, for example, but you’d be better leaning on something like Crashplan or Backblaze, which can be surprisingly affordable and take the pain out of remembering to do backups.
For your second copy, a USB SSD will do – Samsung’s 2TB S7 (£215) offers fast transfer speeds and higher reliability than a spinning-disc alternative – but actual Network-attached Storage, running RAID to mirror your disks, is better. Synology’s DS220j (£180) is a great place to put your drives, and what you fill it with is up to you.