Years ago backing up was easy. I gave my mother-in-law a floppy with the latest draft and she kept it in a safe place. Never needed to ask where that safe place was, of course. Because that's the truth about backup. You only need it when you don't have it. Backup well and regularly and nothing much is likely to go wrong. Let down your guard and...

A few years back a Word file went bad. I didn't mind too much. I was paying for Apple's MobileMe service at the time, which included twice daily backups to the web. So I went to recover the last version and... it wasn't there. The backup service had given up the ghost and never mentioned it. I actually lost something.

And to make it worse when I moaned about this to warn people on the Apple forums some 15-year-old geek came along and scolded me. Didn't I read the small print? The bit where Apple said their MobileMe backup service 'wasn't meant for business'?

I never did work out how Apple divided the bits and bytes it was supposed to be storing into business ones and personal ones. I did, however, pull my money out of MobileMe and look for other solutions. Multiple solutions because the truth is that, if you're paranoid about backup, just one simply will not do.

To begin with though I didn't learn that either. I plugged in one of those 1TB USB hard drives and relied on Time Machine. A few months later I thought I'd just check how this was going. No, I didn't have the Time Machine icon running in the window. Enough clutter up there already. I thought it might beep if it had a problem. It didn't. It just stopped working.

So I restarted that and discovered, after a while, that my Western Digital My Book backup drive would simply go offline from time to time, killing Time Machine too. Worked again if I unplugged it and plugged it back in. But that's not the point, is it? I needed to keep on checking the whole thing was working. And sooner or later it wasn't.

Here, then, comes the latest solution. Let's call it Backup 13 because I've probably been through that many combinations over the years.

<a href="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/002.jpeg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-7967" title="002" src="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/002-300x300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="300" /></a>First... local. I still have the WD My Book. Time Machine still writes to it. But I now have a new bit of kit too, a network drive, the Synology DiskStation DS111 on the right. This is what's called a Network-attached storage device (NAS). Essentially it's a little computer in its own right which hooks onto your network through the Ethernet port on your router. It then runs happily and quietly using very little power (and switching itself off at night if I want) doing a number of different jobs.

The DS111 is just a box with no storage. It costs around £220 though you can get similar things with fewer features for less. It can take two hard drives (I had a couple of 1tb spares that fitted) and use them. It also does something called RAID which combines those two 1tb drives into a single one of the same size with redundant storage. What that means is... if one drive goes down you don't lose anything. The data will always be recoverable from the other working drive.

If all you want is local storage this thing is very easy to set up. You can flick an option and use it directly for Time Machine backups. Or you can just see it as a storage drive attached to your network. I don't want to mimic what I do with Time Machine though. What I really want on this thing is a working copy of my current Documents folder on my desktop.

The DS111 comes with software to achieve this on Windows. For the Mac I use an excellent and inexpensive app called <a href="http://www.econtechnologies.com/pages/cs/chrono_overview.html" target="_blank">Chronosync</a> ($40). This syncs my Documents folder to a storage directory on the DS111 to schedules I want, archiving old copies so I don't lose a thing.

OK - so now I have two forms of local backup, one through USB, one slightly different to the network drive. Now for the clever stuff. The DS111 is a clever, working computer in its own right and will go about its business night and day whether I'm working, have my desktop on, even when I'm away. Backing up to home drives is fine but what if the house burns down? I need offsite backup too.

Enter Amazon S3, a storage service from, yes, that company.