You must also consider other threats to your irreplaceable data. If you delete things to make room on your hard drive, they will eventually disappear from your backup drive, as old backups are deleted to make room for new ones.

It’s important to remember that backup systems, including Apple’s Time Machine, do not provide archival storage. In other words, you needed archival storage as well as a backup. Further, you probably had personal photos and records – banking information, work and health records – that you didn’t want to carry around on a laptop that could easily be lost or stolen. Now you had loads of files – music, movies, multi-megabyte photos – that didn’t even fit on your PC. It changed even more with the arrival of 2-in-1s with tiny 32GB or 64GB storage chips. That scenario changed when people bought laptops instead of, or as well as, desktops. It was a good solution for people who had one desktop PC that stored all their data. This resulted in compressed, incremental backups. The original point of having a backup was to get your PC up and running again if a hard drive failed. In particular, distinguish between backups and archival storage. Backup strategiesīefore you buy anything, work out what you are trying to achieve, and why. NAS drives have their uses, but they are not the cheapest way to back up a laptop. A couple of 4TB Seagate Ironwolfs (£190) or fast and ultra-reliable HGST Deskstars (£229), perhaps? Total cost: between £350 and £400. Then there’s the cost of two hard drives to fill it. First there’s the cost of a good, cheap NAS, such as a Synology DS218j (£165.23). You could buy a two-bay NAS (network attached storage) device, but it would be roughly twice the price. (I’m using Seagate Expansion external hard drives to simplify the example.) This sounds like the sort of setup that would suit you, too.Ī couple of 4TB drives would currently set you back around £174, though you could save about £33 by buying 2TB drives, or about £25 by buying 3TB drives.

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