This is probably worthwhile, when looked at from the point of view of there being hundreds of millions of phones being charged every day.

In New Zealand some power companies have plans that charge you a little more during peak times, but give you a good discount outside the peaks. Electric Kiwi MoveMaster https://www.electrickiwi.co.nz... and Octopus Energy https://octopusenergy.nz/ are two examples, with Electric Kiwi also giving you one free hour of off-peak power each day. Typically shoulder period power is discounted around 25%, and off-peak 50%. Moving water heating and HVAC to off-peak can be a significant savings.

I use Restic https://restic.net/ as my primary backup tool. It does block based, encrypted, de-duplicated, versioned backups on Windows / Linux / Mac / BSD. I store these backups onto both local disks, offsite disks, and AWS S3 in IA storage class. It's a nice, flexible, open source tool. I've been using it for a few years, and I run regular restore tests, and I've never had any issues with restores.

I also store everything to AWS S3 in Glacier deep archive storage class weekly using the AWS CLI, just in case there's a problem with Restic. Storage is cheap. I also mirror everything to an offsite disk using Robocopy.

I used to use Borg but it wasn't very efficient in terms of network / disk use, it rewrote files regularly which took up bandwidth. I also used to use CloudBerry backups but their latest version basically said "start again" and lose all your incremental backups, so I gave up on it. It's a good tool, flexible, with a lot of backend storage options.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S4 that's 7 years old that still works fine, used as my daily driver for about 3 - 4 years. It's on its second battery, and that doesn't last long, but the phone works. It's on a custom ROM to get a newer version of Android.

I had a Huawei P9 that lasted me about three years. The battery was starting to go, and Huawei are not good at updates. Other than the battery capacity being about 2/3 of new it was still working fine.

The Moto G range tend to last 3 - 4 years - based on experience with the G1 and G5. Motorola give you one major OS update and continue security updates for a while longer, which is better than average.

Another way to reduce your space is to empty the trash / recycle bin in Google Drive. Anything deleted is kept and counts against your storage cap until you do this.

You can delete large emails in Gmail easily, as people have outlined above. You can export your email using Google Takeout, but the format it exports as isn't easy for consumers to browse or access. You can also use software like the free edition of Mailstore Home to archive your email to your computer, at which point you can delete it from the cloud - so long as you have effective backups.

I'm disappointed that to get good specifications you have to buy a phone with an enormous screen. Even the base model is 5.7", which is larger than the flagship screens from two years ago. The G7 bezel is smaller than the G5 bezel, which means the phone size isn't that much more than the G5 (13mm taller), but every generation gets a little bigger.

The 5" G5 was a great size, especially for smaller women with small hands. My wife had a G1 and has a G5, but she refused the G6 and wouldn't want a G7 because of size. I guess there's more demand for larger screens than small, but not everyone wants a tablet in their pocket.

I have two seven year old das keyboards, "professional silent" model, both used daily, one at work, one at home. They've worked well during that time, they're well made and I enjoy typing on them. Even the "silent" models with Cherry MX Brown switches are fairly loud when you're trying quickly, to the point I've had a couple of people ask me to type more quietly.

The das keyboard I use at work eight hours a day recently needed internal cleaning as a few of the keys didn't work well, but using CRC CO Contact Cleaner (described as a "Precision Electronic Cleaning Solvent") seems to have fixed it.

https://www.crc.co.nz/CO-Conta...

CloudFlare ( https://www.cloudflare.com/ ) has a free tier that can provide https and a CDN at no cost. Pay for a plan if you need any of the features. Otherwise, as others have said, use Let's Encrypt. I use both for different sites, they both work well.

Live HTTP Headers ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... )is one of my favorite extensions, but it doesn't seem to work under v57. Hopefully it's ported over some time.

Back when I was a junior developer I used to write abstraction layers in case we wanted to change databases. In 20 years no system I worked on ever actually changed. However, in modern times, moving between cloud providers may make this more likely, but still probably relatively unlikely.

If you change from (say) Azure to AWS it's going to be a significant effort. Having to change an application would probably be a small component of this, given the code behind the abstraction layer would have to be changed anyway.

Some centralisation of database access code could be sensible, but writing a whole abstraction layer on the off chance the database is replaced may be a step too far.

I'm not sure I agree with this. Housing is expensive, maybe not as bad as some places but there's a housing bubble right now. Finding rental properties can be difficult - according to the news paper 40 people looked at one rental recently. Anything from overseas often has multiple margins added as it goes through multiple distributors, or if you import it yourself shipping fees can be high and the government charges tax and sometimes duties. Food is cheaper in the UK and the USA - sometimes it's cheaper to buy NZ products like cheese and meat overseas than in NZ.

TCP latency limits the bandwidth of a single international connection, but in parallel you'll get that throughput. Since Netflix has nodes in NZ you could run multiple 4K streams across it no problem, all while downloading files and doing anything else you needed to do.

Plenty people have pointed out the flaws with this approach, around 3/2/1 and "raid is not a backup". I have hard drives in multiple locations with incremental backups - mirrors are vulnerable to ransomware / cryptoware. Critical information is also in CrashPlan, which is versioned.

The question also asks about experience with storage spaces. Around a year ago I purchased two HGST 4TB drives, formatted them ReFS with all integrity checking / fixing options turned on, and put them into a storage spaces mirror on W10. Since then they've worked fine - just like a single regular hard drive. Performance is fine with my older i7-2600K processor and 16GB RAM, but I don't do anything particularly disk intensive, though I do edit up to 1000 RAW photos at a time and haven't seen a problem. The windows event log seems buggy (maybe because I started on the W10 beta) and I can't actually get any information out of the event viewer, so I have no idea if it's detecting and / or fixing issues in the background, but I can access any of my files all the time so it's likely working fine.

The drive does get very, very fragmented according to Defraggler. The Windows tool defragments somewhat, though it still leaves many fragments. Defraggler can try to defragment it, but it's exceptionally slow. I don't know whether or not it's required.

I've used Thunderbird for many years and really like it. If they stop development I'll probably use it as-is for years, until it stops working or I really need something it can't do.

What alternative email clients are there if Thunderbird stopped working today? Free and commercial.

Archive your email using MailStore - I use the home version

http://www.mailstore.com/en/ma...

I haven't eaten meat in about five years, before which I did the Atkins diet on which I ate a LOT of meat. I just had enough. These days I don't like the smell or taste of meat, or of products that try to mimic meat. Tofu trying to taste like meat turns my stomach, I'd far rather they make something taste as good as it can, not like something else.

I agree that getting it to taste familiar might make it easier to convert carnivores, but having tasty high protein options that don't try to mimic flesh would be appreciated by many people.