all well and good - except of course if you HD goes south taking your files with it 
I used to have a small home server and did several backup methods - I now just use the cloud - it is comprehensive enough for my needs.
1 Like
Ensure that Word is making automatic backups/auto saving.
1 Like
I know nothing of clouds, apart from the ones I search for fruitlessly every day, but am interested to know how you can be sure that your clouds can’t be hacked with all your private info there for the world to see?
2 Likes
There are a number of ways to limit cloud account hacking. Most of, if not all, the major players have strongly reinforced their security mechanisms and you can do more by using a very strong password which you don’t use for any other service with a mix of numbers and upper and lower case letters or symbols to add strength.
If the service you choose uses 2FA or two step verification, consider using it. When you sign in to your cloud account, you’ll be required to enter the code sent to your phone or a mobile authenticator app.
Or simply 3 seperate little external hard drives for backup? 
2 Likes
always provided you remember to back up in the first place… cloud systems do the remembering for you
Reminds me of the good old days - backing up our server to a grandfather, father, son tape system - happy days…
2 Likes
That’s more-or-less what we do, in addition to having a clone server in my partner’s garconiere, which receives hourly incremental backups from our main server and so is ready to be wheeled out to replace the main on at a moment’s notice…
The grandfather, father, son cycle are triggered by scripts and we’ll get emails if we’ve forgotten to change the external hard-drives, so we can rerun.
1 Like
I used to do this plus replicating to other PCs etc and RAID, cloud just seems simpler for home use. I also like that I have access to all of my info wherever I am.
1 Like
Assuming you are permanently on-line that is! I can see the advantages but I prefer to be electronics-free when I’m out and about. Just a personal choice of course…
Oh absolutely Angela but in the modern age, it’s not always possible/advisable.
We have a house policy of not taking our mobile devices in to the bedroom within reach at night for example… but OTOH, when making medical or other appointments, having (in our case) Google Calendar to hand makes it easier not to double book something…
And taking the appropriate set of tapes home at the weekend from work in case there was a fire…
1 Like
Unfortunately my “cloud provider” is a nextcloud instance running on my main domestic file server (well, a VM on that box), so it doesn’t actually improve the backup situation much 
1 Like
I find syncthing quite handy for synchronisation through public networks to machines on different LANs.
1 Like
As a matter of interest, whilst using syncthing - do you find any overhead on speed/performance of your PCs?
I don’t work from the computer hard drive, but from the first external and then back up immediately to the 2nd. Once a month I back up to number 3. They are by the main exit from the house so easy to collect as long as the fire isn’t there, and when I was away from home alot with the dogs, all 3 went into a fire, and thief, proof portable safe.
I prefer not to trust to anyone else, no matter how safe and honest they say they are. 
1 Like
I forgot to mention that our servers, suitably encrypted, are accessible from outside so you could say that is was a private cloud but in our control. It gives us pretty well everything a “normal” cloud server would do.
The only noticeable slowdown I’ve encountered is when you add a new device and then sync 80Gb+ across the network to that new device.
Otherwise, just running in the background, nothing really noticeable at all in terms of overhead or network speed.
1 Like