High Availability

Give some thought to how much you depend on digital connectivity and data. Whether it is a little or a lot there are probably some considerations appropriate for you.

My family depends on digital data and connectivity to the Internet a lot. Other than our home furnishings, cars, the food we eat, and my fishing gear--stuff in our life is pretty much digital. Our financial holdings are all digital as are our schedules, work product, photos, records, and communications. We know it's on us to account for our connectivity. And our data? With the exception of our financial holdings--we accept primary responsibility for preserving our data.

Here's what we do...

Equipment and Internet

We like to minimize disruptions when something doesn't work as expected. A single device failing won't slow us down much.

• We have more than one computer including at least two mobile computers.,
• Having phones with data plans helps if the main Internet is unavailable. We also pay attention to nearby establishments that have wifi where we could use a laptop. For a working day--if the outage may be longer than few minutes-- we prefer going to a nearby coffee shop to trying to work at home entirely over our phones., and
• The least durable piece of our home infrastructure is consistently the unmanaged switch. For some reason, no matter which brand we've tried, it fails more often that other equipment. It is pretty impactful when it fails so we have a duplicate switch ready when needed.

The underlying themes here are: if it's required to effectively work with our digital universe--we try to have more than one of them; and, we have a plan B (somewhere to go) for power/carrier outages.

Data

To reduce the risk of permanent data loss we have the following approaches:

• Home: We store our data at home on network-attached storage (NAS). We have a 5 disk Synology DiskStation configured with RAID 5 (striping w/ parity), 1 of the 5 disks on permanent stand-by, and a 6th drive still boxed. This set-up is very convenient when working with data at home. Less so when not at home. I've not sorted out an easy, secure, and effective way to maintain persistent remote access to my home network. I think a NAS is the greatest amount of redundancy that is reasonable for a home user, but a home fire would defeat it.
• Cloud: Recently, because of our frequent travel, we have moved a lot of data to the cloud (Google One). We like this because it is so easy to access when we are not at home. We don't like it because the file sharing is a little wonky. The data has to live in one of our personal folders and be shared from there to the rest of the family. I hope google will introduce some analog to the file system concept of a directory with multiple owners.

The core tenant here is that if the data is important, its on the Synology DiskStation or in Google One. We do not have a stand-alone version of any important data on a single computer's drive. In practice the home network-attached storage is used more and more just for home media, and records we may need access to and things we're actively working on are in Google Cloud.