It is very embarrassing for a rabid cloud computing advocate to admit that for most of last week I have had terrible problems getting on line because the through-the-air connection has been, at best, intermittent and, at worse, totally offline for hours at a time. The worst thing about it is that I cannot just tell them to put the subscription where the sun doesn’t shine because that would be cutting the old proboscis off to spite my face. Let me explain in more detail …
I live in the middle of nowhere. It is so remote that when my cousin and her husband came to visit a few years ago his Sat Nav went blank as they left the last vestiges of civilisation! Because of this rural isolation there is no chance of getting a decent broadband landline connection. All that comes into the village is ancient twisted copper lagged with a sodden cotton wrapping and a neighbour’s fastest speed is 200kb which may sound slow but when you consider an old modem connection limped along at about 30kbs 200kb is positively g-force inducing!
By a stroke of luck some years ago there was some Government scheme to give the geographically disadvantaged fast Internet access through a radio beam. The obvious disadvantage of that is that if you weren’t in line of sight of the aerial you were, how can I put this delicately, stuffed! Fortunately for me a quick glimpse though binoculars showed the mast 10 miles away glinting in the sunshine and once the installation of the aerial was completed I strapped myself into the chair and was off at a mind boggling 2mb … awesome stuff!
In the past when I used to beta test software I use the set the download and then take the dogs for a walk for an hour or so – now the same sized files are on my desktop in seconds! So, you can see why I am loathe to cut my losses with the current provider.
Obviously I cannot allow myself to be at the mercy of such a fickle system so I have worked out a backup system that sounds a bit bizarre but should work if I ever need to resort to it.
First, I have invested in a mobile broadband dongle from 02 and set that up on my desktop so that if the main system crashes I can still connect over the air faster that through a landline modem. The only drawback to this is that if I want to buy a daily, weekly or monthly clutch of airtime I have to pay for it by credit card over the Internet and if my main connection has crashed …. yeah you get there before me.
So the second task was to dig out my old modem and set up a landline connection so that if the main connection goes down, I can fire up the old steam powered modem, connect to 02, buy a tranche of airtime, log off and then kick start the mobile web dongle and carry on from there.
It’s all very convoluted but I cannot afford to be offline for three hours let alone three days so this is a vital part of my cloud survival strategy. But that’s just me, a lone blogger – what about you and your business?
How would you survive if you connection crashed for whatever reason? All your data and is in the clud and beyond your reach. Do you have an emergency contingency plan? If so, please feel free to share it here and help others.
Related posts:
