One of the consequences of the shift from traditional hard drives towards SSDs has been shrinking on-board storage in many computers. While spinning drives are slower than SSDs, they are far more capacious and offer vastly superior bang for your storage buck. That's led many of us to look for external storage solutions and the rise in popularity for cloud storage. The Synology DS119j offers up to 14TB of external storage that's easy shared and accessible across both your local network and across the internet.

Black Friday is almost here and there are stacks of deals around. If you're looking to upgrade or accessorise your computer, there are plenty of great options to heck out.

The subject of file backups and online storage came up the other day at a Lifehacker staff meeting, and resident door-holder Nick Douglas chimed in that his solution for backing up his laptop was easy: He never keeps any important files on it. Everything — and he means everything — lives in the cloud.

Wave goodbye to "Back to My Mac." As of macOS Mojave, Apple is officially removing the helpful file and screen-sharing utility baked directly into the operating system. And while Apple has a few suggestions about what you can now use instead of Back to my Mac, they're less practical, especially since one "solution" is going to set you back a lot of money. Pfft.

There are a lot of services you can use to host your files in the cloud. Dropbox is one solid option, even though it doesn’t give you a lot of storage to play with if you aren’t paying its monthly fee. Still, it’s an incredibly convenient way to access a shared pool of files across your computers and devices.

Even if it’s reached “household name” status for software, here’s a guide to getting the most out of this great storage solution.

We're turning the lens around for this week's Ask Lifehacker. Our Managing Editor Virginia Smith posed a question in our internal Slack channel that cuts wide and deep: "It's safe to delete photos from my iPhone, right?"

iOS: So you’re running out of space on your iPhone. Perhaps you’ve been unable to download that new movie you purchased to your device because there’s no room. Maybe your iPhone has popped up the dreaded “Storage Almost Full” warning.

However you were notified that you were running low on space is irrelevant: Your iPhone is filling up and you should probably look into that sooner, when it’s less critical to do so, than at a later point when you really need to do something and can’t.

If you want to have a Mac that's as free from garbage and stray files as you can get, I recommend giving CleanApp a try. The app runs a background process that keeps track of everything an app dumps on your system when you're installing it. When it's time to remove said app, this ensures that CleanApp takes everything off your system that shouldn't be there.

When you walk into retail store to buy an external hard drive, there are dozens of options to choose from. And there's always the option of buying a hard drive or SSD and putting together your own. So, manufacturers have to find ways to add value to what is a reasonably straightforward device you can rig up yourself. LaCie's answer is the Rugged SECURE. As the name suggests, it combines with physical and logical security features.

Wasteful packaging is an inescapable part of drawing breath in a capitalist society but, for a variety of reasons, most people can't alter their food choices based solely on the materials that contain it. This is why I reuse food packaging whenever I can: sure, it cuts down on waste, but I also get to stock up on storage containers for free.

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.