"I can't afford for this to go wrong, and wrangling a cloud server is a level of trust that makes my toes curl"

Jon gives a long, hard stare to Microsoft's licensing costs, Synology's support for third-party drives and a network cable that costs £3,250

- JON HONEYBALL

Sometimes my head goes into a spin when thinking about all of the weekly grind of updates, licensing renewals and so forth. It's easy to let things slip, especially when I need to buy some licences for the lab. It can be hard to claw back a licence renewal when it pops up on its annual payment, and the product on which the licence was activated is long gone.

Microsoft Office 365 has been a mainstay of the lab since it first appeared. The bundle cost, especially for home users, is exceptional value. I know that Microsoft recently increased the price to cover Copilot costs, but my unfashionable view is that a price rise of a moderate lunch and pint of beer on an annual licence isn’t really excessive. Of course, scaled across hundreds of millions of users, it certainly helps the Microsoft bottom line.

Since Microsoft first bundled Office 365 with server side capabilities, I've been using E3 licences. These were near the top of the pile back then, and gave me Exchange Server hosted in the cloud. This was my primary need, along with the desktop Office licences, because I wanted to stop using on-premise Exchange Server. I had run Exchange since the first beta, but the hassle of keeping the server going with all the updates and so forth was too much like hard work.

By contrast, Microsoft's in-cloud solution just works. You can run it in a hybrid mode, with a mix of onand off-premise servers, but the cloud-only solution has been my preferred choice for years. It’s never gone down and I’ve never lost data on it. Which isn’t to say that I trust it; that’s why I used the excellent free Active Backup for Microsoft 365 platform (tinyurl.com/370activebackup), which runs on the Synology NAS.

This logs into main administrative Office 365 account and then downloads all of the content to the local NAS. I’m talking OneDrive, Mail, SharePoint, Contacts, Calendar and Teams information, all in real-time, updating every minute or so.