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.

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 DS111 below.

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