Say ww3 kicks off and power goes off - how are you keeping your servers up? Solar panels and batteries?
What if there’s a biblical flood and you dont have the means to build an arc? All your servers are destroyed beyond repair?
What if you heard the Feds are coming to cart you and your servers away cos they suspect you of bad mouthing Emperor Tromp? (you’re on the run or subject to months of torture and yeah, you’re never getting your kit back)
What if theres a war and Luxembourg (you know, the enemy) let’s of an EMP pulse that kills your servers and all the infrastructure (power, internet…). How do you access all those cherished pics on Immich?
I’m not suggesting any of this will/can happen, its all just for lols, but have you made any contingency plans? Big binders full of printouts, bug-out bags, those flower-type solar things that track the sun, Faraday cages…
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UPS for 1-2 minutes.
They won’t find my server ;-)
Feds are coming
…most important: I am not inside Usa.
Does your country not have federal agents?
My plan is to load up on canned stew and buckwheat.
If this sort of event were to happen, I would have bigger things to worry about than my data. What use would it be anymore? What about drinking water and food? What about my ADHD meds? Shits about to get very twisted if I stop these meds. I fear for everyone else. In fact, if this sort of event was to happen, everyone should be worried about what happens when I’m not on my meds. Data be damned.
Generation enough to maybe keep the house from total death in winter for a week or so, but it won’t be pretty.
A few months of non-perishable food.
Some spare parts on the shelf
Some offline backups
But reality is, if the apocalypse really happens, it’ll look like the bronze age collapse on steroids, and we’d be lucky if only 90% of people died without our supply chains, especially once winter hits.
Die
I’ll figure out where the nuke is going to hit and stand right there.
Eventual goal - solar with battery backup for the house with isolation ability from the grid. Here in Aus you can have (1) solar tied to grid, (2) solar with batteries tied to grid, and (3) solar with batteries with a grid isolation switch. Only (3) allows you to power your house when the grid goes down.
If my place gets flooded then, due to the terrain, it’s going to be a much bigger problem than data loss (even if it is all my family photos and videos). I think that will be the least of my concerns at that point. That said, I do have off-site backups and I’m also locally archiving to m-discs, so both the flood and EMP problem are not insurmountable in that respect.
Probably the one thing I do need to do is print out a lot of the more recent photos so I have hard copies of ones I want to keep.
archiving to m-discs
Minidiscs?
M-Discs are a specialised form of DVD and Bluray (DVDs require a burner with M-disc capability) that have a longer life than the usual consumer grade discs. Odds are that they will last longer than the technology required to read them.
Cool, never heard of them. Sounds good for archiving stuff that doesnt need to be stored on HDD’s
I miss minidiscs though they were awesome.
Yeah, I like to have important data (such as family photos and videos) backed up on two different formats and M-disc BDs provide an acceptable option. There are various blog posts testing them online versus regular discs and they handle a lot more wear and tear (not that mine get subjected to that!), so I’m pretty confident that mine will outlast me.
Entertainment content I’m willing to risk on regular recordable discs/HDD backups if it’s important enough to put in the effort (I usually buy the physical disc anyway, so I have the pressed CD, DVD or BD to start with).
Haven’t seen a minidisc in ages! I remember some of the cheap IT hardware used to come with those for drivers in the late 2000s.
They sound absolutely indestructible! Id end up with hundreds of them at 24GB each though 🤣 I’d need one of those CD flip books everyone had in their cars in the 90s!
I dont think minidisks ever got used for tech stuff but I think later on you could store/read mp3s with them. Ahh the nostalgia.
Ah, my mistake, I’m getting mixed up between minidiscs and the 8cm mini CDs.
You can get multi-layer M-disc BD-Rs, though, up to the triple layer 100GB BDXL (although you need one of the BDXL burners to write those; the 50GB BD-R DLs can be written by most burners). They cost a pretty penny, though!
The biggest problem now is the disappearance of Bluray burners/writers. Here in Aus there are no internal drives available on the market any more. I’ve had to stock up with a few second-hand spares before they get too pricey.
Mini CDs are news to me too. I do remember folks burning their CVs onto business card sized/shaped CDs at one point. Maybe a close cousin.
I’ve had to stock up with a few second-hand spares before they get too pricey.
Might be a worth a bit in a few years!
Mark 'em up, sell 'em on, profit 😅
Screw electronics. I’ll finally get time to play my 100 board games, pen and paper roleplay games and all the stuff I currently don’t do, because I’m doomscrolling all day. And I might have to ask the neighbour to bring their accordion and sing some Lady Gaga for me until Spotify comes back online.
At some point, you gotta just accept that things are gone and start hunting for the next radroach to eat. I guess the corpo speak for this is acceptable loses and/or risk management.
In the most extreme cases, the final backup of my most important files are on my phone. With all the compromises we’re forced to make there, I still refuse to buy one without an SD card slot, so I have swappable 1TB with me at all times. Importantly, it’s also not the Source of Truth, so if it’s lost I’m still recoverable, but if it’s the last piece of electronics above sea level at least I still have that.
But for power management, I just have some UPSes that sustain a graceful shutdown and that’s about it. If I’m on the lam, I would rather the 20TB of manga and anarchist zines be destroyed (read: crypto keys lost) than try to figure out how to carry it with me. Maybe the offsite backup strategy will finally get tested once I’ve established an alternate identity.
I actually wrote a blog about this a few months back. It was after a 12 day war (Israel+USA attacking Iran) and 40 day internet blackout, and then we got into another war (Israel+USA attacking Iran) and a 90-100 day(lost track) internet blackout.
It isn’t exactly “how to survive the apocalypse” guide but it was a really helpful guide for myself and my friends and helped me keep working in those blackout days.
It’s isn’t focused on hardware, just software, since I’m a software engineer.
@somegeek @jobbies This is a good read. I was rather amused by your “TODO: How to use Git offline? Offline merge requests?” section, though. Git was written by people who literally email each other patches. It’s offline-first, with online stuff tacked on there. You can copy a cloned git repo to a usb stick and give it to someone, and now they have the entire history. Of course merge requests and bug tracking are separate (I understand what you meant w/ the TODO), but git itself is already there.
Grate share, thank you!
In the grand scheme of things the only thing on my server stack that’s really worth anything is immich. The rest will have very little value to anyone once I’m gone. Plan is to create printed books from the photos and those should stay accessible for the future generations, our archive just needs a ton of work on creating those photos and possibly adding descriptions on who’s on the pictures and when they’re taken.
I don’t really plan for ww3 nor solar flare frying half of the planet, but one thing that’s a real problem is that if something happens to myself. My wife or kids don’t know how to manage/access a majority of the stuff there is even if their everyday digital life is using network and services in it I’ve built. They’ll be just fine without pihole or jellyfin, but data in immich/nextcloud is valuable and bus factor for the digital environment is pretty low.
I should at least verify that all server passwords are on my bitwarden vault and set up dead mans switch on that. Then they can at least get someone to pull the data out of the systems or even hire someone to maintain them. Best option would be if one of the kids would learn the ropes, but so far it doesn’t seem like they’re interested on anything like that.
If i am lucky enough to avoid dying il die anyway within a few years. being dependent on medication that expires, sucks 😔😞
Can you get equipment and recipes to synthesise these meds yourself or have someone do it? Befriend some pharmacists and pharma PhDs?
e.g. the DIY bioreactor with fully open source specs and instructions published by Four Thieves Vinegar Collective
depending on the compound it could be anywhere from easy to impossible, but most likely it’s just hard but still possible
“Today, the Apocalypse happened. All that we love and hold dear came to an end. Blood in the streets worldwide, panic, hunger, devastation reigns supreme.”
“What about my database server? Is it still up?”
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As someone who lives within the nuclear blast radius of a military complex, I just hope it will be quick.
work with my community to build a better world from the ashes
#Solarpunk!
