Before the Lights Flicker
Hurricane prep for your digital life. What to do before the grid goes down, not after.
The power goes out on the North Shore. This is not a hypothetical. This is Tuesday.
Sometimes it’s a car hitting a pole on the highway. Sometimes it’s a tropical system. Sometimes PG&E just decides. The grid here is not the mainland grid — it’s a single thread across 100 miles of exposed coastline, and it breaks regularly.
Most people have thought about this for their physical lives: food, water, flashlights, cash. Very few have thought about it for their digital lives.
What breaks when the power goes out
Your router dies. Your internet dies along with it. Your NAS, if you have one, loses power. Cloud services keep running, but you have no way to reach them.
If your home automation runs through a cloud relay — Alexa, Google Home, SmartThings — it stops working the moment your router goes down. Your “smart” home becomes dumber than a light switch.
If your files are only in the cloud, you can’t access them. If your email is only on a server somewhere else, you can’t read what’s already downloaded unless your mail client cached it locally.
Most people discover all of this in the dark. That’s too late.
What survives if you’ve built it right
A local-first setup looks different in a power outage.
Your phone has locally-cached email — everything received before the outage is readable. Your Nextcloud synced your critical files to your laptop before the power went, and they’re still there. Your Home Assistant instance is on a UPS; it keeps running for 4 hours, and your automations keep running because they don’t phone home to any server.
None of this requires heroics. It requires building the right way before the outage — not after.
The practical list
Before anything breaks:
Run your critical documents locally. Not just “available offline” in Dropbox — actually on a drive. Sync regularly, verify the sync, know where the files are.
Get a UPS for your router and your critical home server hardware. A $80 UPS from the hardware store will keep both running for 2-4 hours during a brief outage. That’s usually enough.
Print the things that matter. Network passwords. Emergency contacts. Account recovery codes. Paper survives power outages, water damage, and ransomware.
Set your mail client to keep a local copy of everything. Not just recent mail — everything. Mail clients default to caching only recent messages. Change this setting.
Know your backups. Not “I think it’s backing up” — actually run a restore test. Know where the backup files are. Know how to use them.
The harder question
How long could you operate without internet?
Not just entertainment — work. Communication with clients. Access to your files and systems. Your business records.
Most people’s honest answer is: not long. A few hours before it becomes urgent.
That’s the gap worth closing. Not because the internet is likely to go out for days — it usually isn’t. But because building systems that work without it as a forcing function produces better, more resilient systems in general.
The infrastructure you build for the three-day outage serves you better on every ordinary day too.