I had accumulated too many files on the laptop. A lot of them were photo files. After moving pictures off my camera and phone, and processing them on the laptop, I moved them on again to one or other of my external hard drives. So, on the average day, fifty in, fifty out. But I did retain a collection of 'best' pictures on the laptop, and the size of that collection had grown a lot in recent years. It now amounted to over 32,000 pictures, which took up 68GB on the laptop. In itself, that was not a storage problem, nor was it likely to become one in the next two or three years. It was the other stuff on top of that 68GB that was putting pressure on the laptop's storage.
So I've just spent a couple of hours moving all possible files from the laptop onto my external hard drives, leaving only that 'best' photo collection (and my digital Ordnance Survey mapping) on the laptop. The headroom has now improved to almost 73GB.
That may sound a lot, but I will have to be careful not to waste it. I can't afford to buy another laptop until 2022 (it'll be the Microsoft Surface Book 3, with a 1TB SSD inside it for storage, and the latest processor. I anticipate it will cost me at least £2,500). That new laptop will solve my storage problems. Everything can be moved back to it, with oodles of room to spare. And performing regular, comprehensive backups to a separate device will be easy.
At the moment my backups have to be selective, and are not comprehensive at all. I drew up a diagram on a spreadsheet, to get a bird's-eye view of what was backed up where.
Click on this if you want to see the detail, but basically the top row shows places in the Cloud, the middle row shows my phone and laptop, and the bottom row shows the destinations of the manual backups I make at regular intervals. The grey lines signify automatic, continuous backing up to Cloud storage. The green lines mean manual backups. The pale yellow lines indicate straightforward storage, and not a backup.
Everything recent has a copy somewhere else. But there's a lot of older stuff residing on one or other of the external hard drives that does not have a copy anywhere else. That's a hole in my system.
I have considered buying extra Cloud storage, but to backup up everything would require almost 500GB of Cloud storage, and that wouldn't be cheap. Not unless I scattered it about - and then managing it would become a chore.
Ideally I want a laptop with big SSD storage, plus an even bigger (and very fast) powered SSD to keep my comprehensive backups in one place and quickly accessible. They need to be bought together, in order to be USB-compatible. But I can't have that yet. I must wait until 2022.
What are the risks of staying with my present set-up? I've worked through several scenarios, to see what could be recovered, and from where, if (say) this or that bit of my computer equipment malfunctions, or gets stolen, lost or destroyed. Taking a view, I am not safe from loss, but a total loss is unlikely. I can live with that, for another two years anyway.
I will however look into copying selected items to Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, just in case. They haven't much between them in the way of free Cloud storage, but some things could certainly go up there. I just have to decide which.
And then amend my diagram!
Sequel
Hmm. I wasn't impressed with the free Cloud storage available:
Google Drive 15GB
Microsoft OneDrive 5GB
Dropbox 2GB
The Microsoft and Dropbox free allowances were too small to be any use to me. And the only item that would suit the 15GB Google Drive free allowance was my mp3 music collection, which takes up 8GB of space on one of my external hard drives. But when I began to upload the 1,800-odd tracks to Google Drive, it told me that it had detected double that number, and - judging by the space the first few uploaded tracks were using - a complete upload would swallow a lot more than 8GB. I'd probably exceed my allowance! And then I'd be paying.
I really don't want to get into paying for Cloud storage. So I won't be backing-up this way, beyond what already happens.
