Ever since I decommissioned my aged desktop Dell PC in 2018, I've been unable to conduct a general offline backup of everything stored on my devices.
Apart from my laptop and phone, I have four external hard drives of various capacities, plus a small flash drive. Between them, they store all my digital files with some space to spare, though no single device can handle it all. To some extent they can provide partial backups for each other, if I copy things around. But that's not a comprehensive backup in any genuine sense. I've really wanted to have a separate device that could genuinely backup all my stuff in one place. Now I've bought it.
I'm not on a spending spree. I've looked at replacing my laptop next year at a cost of £2,500+, and discovered that I need not. I've lately considered buying a new electric cooker, and having it wired in, for a cost of £1,000+, and decided that I will make do and wait. So actually that's £3,500 or more saved for now.
What I have just done is to buy a 2TB external SSD from Amazon for £243.20 plus premium delivery - £248.19 altogether.
It's a Samsung T5, lately superseded by the T7 as Samsung's SSD top dog, but still on sale. It will suit my 2016 laptop better. It should arrive in two days' time, and I can at once carry out a long-overdue General Backup. Then everything will be safe. And I'll repeat it at regular intervals thenceforth. Every six months will do.
I will still have my other kinds of backup, scheduled to be done daily, every three days, every week, every month, or every six months, depending on what it is. For instance, my documents are manually backed up every three days, even though most of them (being in Dropbox) are continuously backed up to the Cloud; my blog posts every month; and my music every six months. I use my various external drives, and keep them in different places.
I take it all very seriously. I know what it feels like to lose six months' worth of photos - as I did in 2000. That loss included the pictures of an entire recent holiday in France. M--- was not pleased. And I felt utterly foolish and incompetent. Not to say totally gutted. Never again!
I hope to sleep a little better at night now.
