Disaster Recovery – The Climb #891

Sunday 1st August 2021

After yesterday’s disaster, today was about getting myself back up and running. Were it not for the fact that I’m already very resilient I’d be in a much worse place.

I learnt to be mobile back when I ran A-F. Heading over to the US to cover events like the Toy Fair or San Diego Comic Con might sound like a lot of fun – and they were – but they were jobs. I stressed myself out, I made myself ill. Not only was I working the floor helping to take pictures, but I was then coming back, writing everything up, and trying to maintain the servers. When you were getting millions of hits an hour, trying to keep everything running was a nightmare. One story only needed to blow up and you’d be swamped with traffic that would make a DDOS look tame. I cannot tell you how many servers at our hosts I actually managed to cook.

But it meant having all the tools I needed on the road. The contact for the hosts were no good sat at home. Neither were the MYSQL details. Given that when I started I was working with hotel dial up (Hello $400 bills just for the phone), this was pioneering stuff.

I’ve carried that knowledge forward though. The technology has got a lot easier though. I ensure that any apps or services I use as part of my day to day are cross-platform as much as possible. I want everything from my choice of writing tool to task tracker to be accessible on every device.

I’m not fully in the cloud because I want to cover the potential for the internet going down, so I try and choose tools where they will work offline. So I end up doing a lot of syncing rather than working from the cloud.

My writing is synced as I write. Scrivener is great at doing that to the point that the fact that I can pick up any device and continue where I left off is easily forgotten as a technical feat. I’ve recently used this to sync my World of Warcraft add-on configurations and it’s made it so much easier to play on a desktop or laptop.

But my system isn’t perfect. Whilst I could theoretically work from my mobile, my current weak point is thumbnails for The Climb. So I spent yesterday morning installing Photoshop to my laptop, and then creating new thumbnails for the two editions I had to post. The ones sitting on my laptop can be renumbered once I get the PC repaired.

I was able to get 2 editions of The Climb up and get all the end of month and week activities done that I needed to do. I’m not going to bother trying to install my streaming or video editing software on the laptop. I’ve decided all those projects will have to be put on hold for a couple of weeks.

Whilst I’ve come off of the PC death fairly lightly, it does make me think about future challenges. Are there scenarios where I might have not come off so well? It’s dangerous to be arrogant that you have all angles covered when something like this happens.

However, I’m back and running, and can keep going for now. I just hope the warranty people are quick to act on getting the desktop back in action.