Apple recently (and finally) brought Messages to iCloud, which we've written about a bit over the past month because it's just that useful and necessary of a feature. However, with all new, great things comes confusion; setting it up can be a bit of a head-scratcher and apparently, figuring out just what it's doing is equally question-inducing.

NAS devices have transformed from simple storage devices into multimedia and data management centres that are as much at home in the home as they are in the office. The QNAP TS-453Be straddles that line between work and play, offering a bunch of connectivity, applications and storage options. And while it offers a rich set of features, it's let down by some usability challenges.

Windows: Most computer geeks know about WinDirStat, an incredibly useful utility that shows which folders and files are taking up so much room on your drive. It's a must-have app, because you'll be surprised - heck, I've been surprised - how many times you might find some random, triple-buried folder on your desktop that's using an unseemly amount of space.

This one's almost a cop-out, since all Windows users should know about WinDirStat by now. This app has been out for nearly 15 years, and it's one of the most helpful tools you can use to clean up your hard drive.

Windows: Sometimes, finding the right Windows settings to automate some portion of your digital life feels like digging through the nooks and crannies of your couch to find loose change. In this case, Windows' "Storage Sense," a handy way to automate hard drive cleaning, has probably been staring you in the face for a while, you just never thought to activate it. And you should.

Drives fail. And no matter how many backups you have, losing a drive when you're in the middle of working on something important -- my namesake's law -- can be a real pain in the arse. Thankfully, replacing your old-and-busted drive with a brand-new drive is one of the easiest upgrades you can make.

Organic peanut butter is tasty stuff, and it can even be part of a healthy diet as long as you don't eat too much. But when you store it for a while (or in some cases, when you first buy it), the oils separate from the rest of the butter and rise to the top, which requires a vigorous stirring before you can spread the goodness. A quick flip can fix that.

Magnetic knife holders are a great way to keep your knives at the ready, sure, but they're also useful for keeping other household items organised and easy to grab. (That is, provided they're a good amount of metal in them, such as drill bits or paperclips.) Below, other strategies for putting a magnetic knife strip to use in your bathroom, office, workshop and kitchen.

LaCie has been around for a long time - mainly appealing to Mac owners who are prepared to pay extra for stylish enclosures that match their hardware. The LaCie Rugged brings together an aluminium enclosure and bright orange protective surround that offers physical protection for your data as well as the offer of data protection services.

The humble USB drive - supplanted by the download and the cloud sync, but still useful in all kinds of ways. If you've got an old drive lying around, here are some of the ways you can put it to use that don't just involve sharing old pics to your mum.

Every IT admin knows the pain of having unused user accounts lingering around. But when you run a global cloud storage business, unused accounts can be a pain in the butt. For Dropbox, which is preparing to go public and is facing stiff competition from Microsoft, Google, Apple and others, the need to better manage infrastructure costs is particularly acute. In a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Dropbox has said they've been able to save over US$35M in infrastructure costs. One of the things they did was delete data from inactive users.

Eventually, we all run out of storage. And we all want to get our hands on our information as fast as possible. In most cases, that combination of requirements means looking for an array of SSDs. But Samsung has upped the ante with a massive 30.72TB SSD - one of the most capacious 2.5" drives ever made.

We now store more content at home than ever before. And even though streaming services like Netflix, Stan, Apple Music and Spotify are changing the way we access media, we still need to ensure data is reliably backed up. Many of us - me included - have large libraries of digital content we've already paid for and want to be able to access at home or work. So, what makes a good NAS and what's available on the market?

If you have kids who love LEGO, you've probably shouted in pain after stepping on LEGO bricks. Those things get everywhere. Here's a DIY solution from The Handyman's Daughter. Using an IKEA Lack side table, a Trofast bin and some baseplates, you can create a play table with a drawer to keep the pieces contained.

The longer you wait to open that bottle of wine the better, right? Well, unless you actually bought some nice wine designed to be aged, not really.

When board game publishers put together the contents of a box, they focus mainly on making sure that the game gets safely from their warehouse to the store shelf. Once you take the game home and punch the cardboard tokens, there's a good chance that you'll be left with a unwieldy mass of cardboard loosely crammed into a box.

Here are a handful of ways to help organise the insides of your board games to make setup and tear down of games much easier.

External hard drives used to be really boring. Most manufacturers did little more than stuff and off-the-shelf consumer hard drive into an enclosure and mark the whole thing up by 200 per cent to make a tidy profit.

But a couple of things have changed. People expect high levels of reliability SSDs and new connection busses like USB3 and Thunderbolt have upped the performance ante, and the market expects stuff that is stylish and doesn't look like it was made in a Russian tractor factory. LaCie had a reputation for style and their Bolt3 offers performance that's comparable to an internal drive.

I recently attended a press and analyst summit run by UK events company NetEvents. The event, held in San Jose this year, introduced me to a few companies I’d not come across before that offer interesting products and services. Here are five I think are worth keeping an eye on.

While cloud storage has put a huge dent in the need for small storage devices to act as a kind of sneaker-net, there's still a place for external storage devices. When it comes to remote backups or moving large volumes of data, external hard drives are still very useful. With portable hard drives, reliability and performance are of paramount concern. That's why I've been looking forward to testing the Western Digital My Passport SSD and LaCie Rugged USB-C drives out.