Backup of Backups
I remember listening to a podcast featuring ex-Marine Jocko Willink who repeated the Marine mantra “two is one, and one is none”. It relates to Murphy’s law that since something will go wrong, you better have a backup.
Sometimes, it’s good to have a backup of a backup.
A few weeks ago, the power went out and I was self-congratulatory because I had an uninterrupted power supply connected to the modem and main WiFi. I checked my phone and saw that the WiFi was still strong — then I saw something else… an exclamation mark. This indicated that indeed the Internet was down.
The second fallback was to just use my cellphone’s tether.
I felt sad as I was looking forward to the day of still having mainline Internet in the event of a power failure, but I must have failed to account that routers somewhere upstream might have gone offline if the power generally stopped. Disappointing but not devastating.
With Starlink and other mobile carriers offering backup Internet, we can hope that in the next few years Internet access will become a high availability service.
