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Showing posts from October, 2026

Best NAS for Home Backup and Media in 2026: A Beginner Guide

October 22, 2026

Last updated: October 22, 2026. Details come from WIRED's NAS guide, Gadget Wisdom's home NAS guide (August 16, 2026), a Wirecutter NAS excerpt (updated March 2, 2026) and CISA backup guidance, read October 22, 2026. Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Some links below are affiliate links, which means this site may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Quick answer A NAS is a small always-on storage box for backups, file sharing and media streaming, and most models are sold without drives. Reviewers favor Synology for polished software, while UGREEN and TerraMaster offer more hardware for the money. RAID protects against a drive failure, not deletion, ransomware or theft, so keep another copy and plan for a UPS. A network attached storage device, or NAS, is a small server that sits on your home network and stores files for every computer, phone and TV in the house. People use one to back up family photos, share documents and strea...

Best External Hard Drives for Backup in 2026 and the 3-2-1 Rule

October 21, 2026

Last updated: October 22, 2026. Drive notes come from WIRED's external drive guide (September 2026) and backup guide (March 2026), PCWorld's drive roundup (October 4, 2026 listing), CISA's backup guidance and Apple Support (published October 16, 2026), read October 22, 2026. Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Some links below are affiliate links, which means this site may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Quick answer Follow 3-2-1: three copies, two kinds of storage, one copy off-site, as CISA's backup guidance describes. WIRED's top pick for cheap bulk backups is a desktop hard drive, the WD Elements, while portable and SSD options suit travel and speed. Buy a drive at least twice the size of your computer's storage, set backups to run automatically, and test a restore before you need it. Hard drives can fail without warning, and one copy of your photos and documents on one drive is not a backup plan. This gu...

Best Portable SSDs in 2026 for iPhone, Mac and PC: How to Choose

October 21, 2026

Last updated: October 22, 2026. Specs and picks come from Newegg Insider (published October 6, updated October 7, 2026), WIRED's external drive guide (updated September 2026) and Apple Support's iPhone guide, all read October 22, 2026. Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Some links below are affiliate links, which means this site may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Quick answer Match the drive to your port first: USB 3.2 Gen 2 drives run near 1,050 MB/s, and Gen 2x2 drives near 2,000 MB/s only on devices that support it. For iPhone, Apple says the drive needs a single data partition in a supported format such as APFS, exFAT or FAT32. Treat a portable SSD as one copy, not your only copy, and check current retailer prices because WIRED reports big price jumps. A portable SSD is one of the easiest ways to free up space on a phone or laptop, move large photo and video files, or keep a quick extra copy of your work. The catch is ...