Praise, of sorts- Maplins (aka nice try, but no sale.. yet!)

skintpaul

Wandered into maplins, checking out prices of external memory, to backup laptop..

Initial hard drive I saw was, I thought, a tad dear.. on way out, a 'Maplineer' (their phrase, not mine!) asked if I found what I was looking for.

I mentioned memory need, and he pointed over to their range of 'personal cloud' boxes - essentially your own server, attached to home router, with (password protected!) access over t'internet, or wifi..

Something I had not considered, at all. :beer:

I think either 1 Tb or 2 Tb capacity was £99 odd..

nyermen

I kind of like maplins, always spot something interesting that I "must..not...buy..." each time I browse.

One note - I've got a cloud box (not from them), because I have a cheap desktop and a mac, and my housemate has a laptop, makes it easy as an "auto backup option". Make sure you're aware of the capacity of your network. These cloud boxes normally plug into the router's ethernet port, so if you have a slow wifi network or the router doesn't support 1000mb to plug it in, you may be limited in capacity. A 100 megabits per second is 12.5 megabytes per second (I think), ie. even slower than a USB2 copy speed (and a lot slower than a USB 3 hard disk if your machine supports it, they normally manage at least 80 megabytes per second and can be significantly more).

skintpaul

How do I find out speed of my (internal?) network? Internet download speeds are around 8-9 megawotists, on wifi.

Haven't used hard wired (ethernet cable) link, between router and laptop- would that be quicker?

Ectophile

Wired is almost certainly faster than wireless. Most kit these days supports 100Mbps. Modern computers go up to 1Gbps, but all your kit (including the router) have to support it.

In Windows, you can find out the speed of the connection. Go to the Network and Sharing Center. Look for the link(s) labelled "Connections:" and click on it/them. In the dialog box that pops up, one of the figures will be "Speed".

Personally, when it comes to backup, my preference is a USB hard disk. I plug the disk in, do the backup, unplug it again and put the disk in a safe place. The unplugging is important. There are nasty viruses around these days that will encrypt all your files and charge you a ransom for the key to decrypt them all again. If your backups are permanently connected to the computer, then they are just as vulnerable.

keyser666

For that price you would be better off looking at a HP Proliant Micro Server and then add disk space