Ask Paul: May 21 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We’re in Boston as part of the busiest month of travel we’ve had in years, but we can still kick off the weekend with some great reader questions.
NAS futures
helix2301 asks:

What do you think the future of NAS (Network Attached Storage) is I feel like the people that need that much storage are still going to buy them regardless of cloud storage.

It’s funny you ask this, as I was just thinking about this topic, though it was for more personal reasons. I’ve been using a WD MyCloud Ex NAS for six years now, and it’s been having a few reliability issues. Sometimes it just disappears from the network, in the sense that’s unreachable from my Windows PCs. And sometimes I get a red light on one of the two (redundant) hard drives, but when I investigate from the dashboard, I can’t see a problem. In both cases, unplugging it and then rebooting it seems to fix things, at least temporarily. But it’s really slow, to come up again on reboot and in general, and while that would bother me more if I relied on it more, it’s still not ideal.

I agree that there will always be a market for NAS devices, but I feel like the need is dramatically less over time because of cloud storage services. For me, the NAS is another backup of crucial data, and because it’s local, it’s always accessible, even if the Internet goes down. But it’s odd to me that it is much faster, and much more reliable, to find documents on OneDrive or Photos on Google Photos than it is to do so via the NAS. And I find myself “using” it less as a result. It’s still a backup point. But it’s not really my go-to anymore.

At some point, I’ll need to figure out how to move forward. I assume and expect that consume/prosumer NAS products have improved since I bought this, and you’re right that those who need lots of storage can benefit from using something like this. But for most consumers, USB-based hard drives probably solve that need, even though there aren’t many options with data redundancy capabilities.
Windows 10 anti-ransomware functionality
crunchyfrog asks:

I discovered something very interesting that I wanted to share with you and your audience. Microsoft has a way of coming up with innovative ideas but not really calling attention to them and leaving them buried in a sub menu and turned off. Case in point; Microsoft has placed an infinitely useful feature within Windows Defender that can thwart the scourge of ransomware by protecting the most useful and sensitive folders within your Windows profile such as Documents, Photos, etc.

To locate this feature the easiest way to get to it is click on Start and just start typing Ransomware. Click the switch to turn on the service and that's it. If a program get blocked you'll see a message in Windows and just head back to the Ransomware Protection feature and click on Block History and you'll see the blocked app which you can grant access to. Users can also manually allow ap...

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