Easy, Cheap Digital Life Redundancy

This is a belated response to the “I’ve locked myself out of my digital life” post that was circulating earlier this month. Its author describes a hypothetical situation in which a single unexpected disaster (such as a lightning strike) could cause disruptive damage to your digital – and in turn, to your “analogue” – footprint.

The post is thoughtful and makes a good point – I’m not really arguing against it. In fact, I believe that everyone should be doing some sort of prep work for unforeseen events. However, a lot of the theoretical aftermath can be avoided with this one simple trick that you may already be doing: redundancy. Keep a spare work laptop* at your office or in your parents’ house, use a password manager with a secure online repository (such as pass with git), and you’ll be fine until Russia invades. Plus, that’s a little less dead weight to lug around when biking to work.

* – five-year old Thinkpads and Latitudes go for around 250 EUR, but you can run Firefox and Vim on a 10 year old X220 as well.


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