Okay, the donor came through already. So I'm pulling the trigger on the 1512 & 3 3TB WD Red HDs. Which with the Synology Hybrid RAID should give me 6TB usable space and 3TB parity. Then when the 4TB Reds come out, I'll add two two of them, which will give me 13TB usable space and 4TB parity, if I'm reading the calculator right. And then down the road I'll be able to add two more units if I need them.

Wow!

Plants vs Zombies is free on the App Store today.

Okay, I need to buy a new phone, stat, because mine is out of internal memory and the battery doesn't last the day anymore. I'm likely getting the Samsung Galaxy SIII, which is what my siblings just got.

Are there any good backup options for an unrooted phone? What should I be concerned about? I have SMS Backup and Restore, which should carry over my messages, but it doesn't seem to include multimedia messages; is there a way to save those? My sister sends me pictures a lot. Can I save/backup my Dolphin settings? What is the best way to save all my Angry Birdses progress?

And then when I get my new phone, I should root it, but I have no idea how to do that and what it really means and I am scared.

If you don't know what rooting means, why do you think you should do it? You should at least catch up on that before you make the call. Instructions aren't hard to find, though. If your phone's rootable, that's not an issue.

I reset my phone to factory and then re-installed from my Google cloud backup, and I got what I needed--if you want to save pictures, then save them and copy them to the new phone.

P-C just wants to root it because all his friends are doing it.

Maybe.

If you don't know what rooting means, why do you think you should do it?

I know that it allows you do a lot more with your phone, including the ability to uninstall the bloatware that comes with it. Which probably contributes to the increased battery life.

re-installed from my Google cloud backup

What does this mean? Does the cloud know what I have installed on my phone and will it do it all for me? Or do I individually install the apps (I know all the ones I've ever bought are in my Play account)?

Does the cloud know what I have installed on my phone and will it do it all for me?

I'm not going to speak for the different versions of Android, but there's a backup & reset section of Settings, and it lets you back up your data and designate automatic restore of backed up settings and data when reinstalling an app. When I had to bring this phone back to life, I didn't do it piece by piece.

Since I have three devices and multiple accounts across all of them, I no longer know where I stand, so I would still research it.

I know that it allows you do a lot more with your phone, including the ability to uninstall the bloatware that comes with it. Which probably contributes to the increased battery life

The only things I have wanted to do and can't do are a system-level backup and turning on GPS through code. Turning on GPS is actually no big, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to restore the phone with the level of backup allowed by Android itself. But you should let Gris or another rooter extol the virtues. I was intending to root my phone when I got it, got distracted, and don't feel the loss. Even when I had to do a reset I didn't bother rooting it then either.

I'm not going to speak for the different versions of Android, but there's a backup & reset section of Settings, and it lets you back up your data and designate automatic restore of backed up settings and data when reinstalling an app. When I had to bring this phone back to life, I didn't do it piece by piece.

Oh, cool. Those options are checked in my settings, so I guess...that will do its thing, I suppose.

You may need to manually move your pictures off of your phone onto a computer or something. I think the MMS pictures normally get saved to your gallery, so they're probably in the same place as any other pictures you might have, but I could be wrong about that; I never use MMS. But lots of stuff will definitely be backed up automatically.

The only reason I root is because I enjoy the fiddling. I don't think it's a necessity. I like Titanium Backup, which is rooted phones only, but I only really need it because I constantly install new ROMs (essentially entirely new OSes) on my phone, and need to restore my apps in a more efficient way than Google does it.

I install new ROMs because I hate the bloatware you mentioned. But people seem fairly satisfied with the S3 as is out of the box - I'd say get it, play with it, and if you feel it has lots of bloat look into rooting later. But if you're not a fiddler, you probably don't need to root. If and when I get a Nexus 4, I may not bother, since I won't need to get rid of HTC bloat.

I don't even know if I would bother to jailbreak an iPhone anymore (if I had one) since they finally installed a decent notification system. I probably would, just to get slightly better Google Voice integration, but it would be halfhearted.

The NAS came! But not Dave's laptop. And I'm in such a cranky mood I dunno if I dare try setup and configuration.