The Importance of Backing Up

Use a simple and highly effective cyber defense technique to protect your household from DOGE cyber attacks and outages.

Hey Friends,

How are you holding up? It’s been a weird unsettling week. I am coping by giving myself the goal of doing 1 thing a day to prepare for a possible outage in federal infrastructure for banking, healthcare and/or telecommunications systems. For me, preparing is a productive way to channel stress.

What can you do to prepare: Back up.

While the DOGE team of hackers are harvesting our data for nefarious purposes we can be busy working to keep their sticky fingers off our real world stuff.

🔒Backing up your data is both the best and simplest way to keep hackers from taking more from you.

Why back up?

I have spent the last two decades of my life building enterprise systems for the two big tech giants: Apple and Microsoft. You may think those companies are very different, and culturally they are, but as large firms they share a lot of similarities in that they prioritize optimizing as much as possible.

Sound familiar?

🧚 DOGE’s focus on “efficiency” is Big Tech fairy dust and part of the aspirational promise of technology to optimize everything.

Big Tech companies know that there is a lot of waste in insecure, unreliable systems which can increase downtime in their services and lead to a loss of money for their shareholders. For this reason, backing up critical systems is top priority for these companies, and here I’ll share best practices used by the most successful tech companies in the world so you can do it at home.

♟️Let’s beat them at their own game, shall we? ;)

Identify single points of failure

A single point of failure is a person, or process that, if it fails, other parts of the system break. In Big Tech we fix single points of failure using a thing called redundancy (aka we make back ups of everything).

My single points of failure are: I need my phone for navigation, I hate paper and writing things down and I only use my iPhone for communication.

👀 Look back at the technology in your life

Technology spends a lot of time looking at us, studying us, learning from us and ultimately changing us. But how much time do we spend studying the technology in our lives with a similar level of curiosity and obsession?

🧐 Now is the time to see the bigger picture of technology’s role in your life.

Think of technology through household systems like:

• Power

• Food storage

• Telecommunications

• Home healthcare

• Navigation

• Information storage

For each of these systems let’s talk about a possible back up.

📍Try not to buy from big box stores, if you can buy local stuff, do that.

Power

Electricity is one of those things that is so easy to take for granted until it’s gone, and then it’s a crisis. Growing up in the country we always had a generator, because living in a rural area prone to thunderstorms and tornadoes meant we were guaranteed black outs.

⛈️ I am treating the DOGE cyber attack like a severe thunder storm in that I am planning to weather through it.

Invest in a generator

Now is a good time to invest in a generator. Generators can cost anywhere from $500- as much as you want to spend, so if you are worried about budget now would be a good time to see whether you have neighbors or family that want to invest in a generator with you. As a bonus this will help you build community and get to know your neighbors better.

From my time living on the West coast I learned that many people there have standby generators (or whole house generators). If you can afford to put one in now is the time to do it. I anticipate they will only get more expensive. Costco sells them and will arrange the install.

There are a lot of varieties of generators. Spend time researching and find one that fits your budget and needs. Also, don’t forget to buy gas cans! Even they become scarce during power outages. I’d recommend you get at least 2.

Invest in analog power technology

Now is a good time to buy:

• A strong flashlight

• AA and AAA batteries

• A camping “lantern”

• Candles

• Matches

The good thing about all these is, other than the batteries, they have an unlimited shelf life.

Food storage

Before home refrigeration technology, people relied on ice to be delivered to their “ice box” at home or they stored their food underground, in a cellar.

Don’t let food storage be a single point of failure.

Think about how you would store food for long periods of time. For many people, this will mean buying non perishables for their pantry. Or, for those that can, consider building a cellar.

My grandparents grew their own food on our family farm, Land Family Home, and my grandmother canned our farmed fruits and vegetables. Canning has always freaked me out but it’s not hard to find local canned goods at your farmers market or general store. Consider stocking up.

Finally, fill your freezer up with frozen produce and consider getting a second freezer if you have a big family.

Telecommunications

2025 is the year that walkie talkies and pagers make a come back.

In addition to being an analog technology that is localized to a physical range (geo-fenced), walkie talkies are also helpful for receiving weather alerts and staying mobile.

Today I started using walkie talkies I bought at Costco that have a 28 mile range which actually covers the bulk of anywhere I need to go.

It’s great to know I can keep in touch with people without having to give Big Tech any of my data. Also having a “pager” is fun. I’m looking forward to teaching my kid how to use it.

🧘🏽‍♀️ Let’s take a minute to say how incredibly powerful you will feel to have your privacy back.

Finally, get a HAM license and consider activating a land line with a voicemail machine.

Home Healthcare

Suggested household items to have in your medicine cabinet:

• Plan B, Mifepristone, birth control

• Ibuprofen and zofran

• Three months of prescriptions

• Sleep aids and cold medicine

• N95 Masks

• Gloves

• Disinfectant

• Rubbing alcohol

🗺️ Navigation

I am most pleased with what I discovered this week: which is I can download an entire state of offline maps from the Apple Maps app.

Apple has made it incredibly easy to download offline maps and you can also use your smart phone for navigation while it is in airplane mode/ not connected to a network.

In the Apple Maps app go to your account settings and you should see the option for “offline maps”, select that then put in where you frequent to download the map. I was thrilled that I could download my entire state. The app worked so good this morning I didn’t even realize I was in offline mode while driving to the doctor’s office.

I recommend turning off the “update automatically” option because I don’t trust that the government won’t continue to rename things because of politics (smh “Gulf of America”).

🥷🏼 Interesting fact: Ariel maps were invented by Leonardo DaVinci as a weapon of war.

📚 Information

Buy the banned books that are important to you, soon they might all be burned/ erased.

Get a library card so you can check out books and also have a reliable computer and wifi to use to research topics online.

While reading may be a dying pastime, knowledge will always be a powerful weapon.

Buy a notebook and printer.

Make sure you have plenty of paper, pens and other writing utensils.

Pace yourself

Well friends, I’m signing off now. I hope you are all hanging in there. Things are about to get a lot worse before they get better, but if we prepare now, we may end up better off than most.

I’ll share more when I am up for it, writing this post was my “1 thing” I did today and I already feel better.

Lexi