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How would one go about protecting their own personal backups from something like this? Would a hard-drive be fine if it is just not plugged in at the time? Or

How would one go about protecting their own personal backups from something like this? Would a hard-drive be fine if it is just not plugged in at the time? Or would it need to be stored in some sort of faraday cage?

lrem 6y ago
A safe in the cellar, under the 4 weeks worth of food and water reserve, seems about right.
monkeynotes 6y ago
Faraday cages around anything electronic that you care about. Honestly though, your digital media is going to be the last thing you are going to care about as you are starving to death with no water, heat, power, and armed people roaming the streets looking to take all your provisions. Your faraday or powered down devices also won't prevent them getting destroyed in a neighbourhood going up in fire either.
kwhitefoot 6y ago
I think it would be safe. In the Carrington event the damage was caused by currents induced in long wires. Of course we have a lot more long wires now so the problems would be correspondingly larger. I suspect that more damage would be caused by secondary effects than the direct effect of the induced currents. Some power lines would trip out and this would add extra load to other circuits which would trip out even if not affected by the direct effects of coronal mass ejection. In a poorly designed or poorly maintained power distribution system this will cause a cascade of failure that can disable power supplies and communications over a huge area. This sort of cascading failure happened in the US North East in 2003, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003. See https://www.wired.com/2011/09/0902magnetic-storm-disrupts-telegraphy-carrington-event/ https://www.wired.com/2011/09/0902magnetic-storm-disrupts-te... for some first hand comments.
jaycroft 6y ago
The danger from CMEs comes from very very large scale current loops (thousands of miles in perimeter, hundreds of square miles in enclosed area). The issue is a slowly varying but intense change in magnetic flux. We're not talking even as strong as the earth's magnetic field, but over a large encircled area you can get one hell of an EMF. This is bad for power lines. This can also be bad for thousand foot tall AM radio towers and their conductive guywires. This is not a problem for your cell phone. Your hard drive, even if it is legacy spinning metal in a live laptop disconnected from your wall power will not notice any more than it will notice you setting your credit card down on the palm rest, from some basic order of magnitude on the change in dB/dt.
GnarfGnarf 6y ago
Back up to DVD.
- rmilk 6y ago
  I found BluRay-R double or quad sided is truly affordable and gives up to 50-100 GB per disc. Cost is < $2 per disc for 50 GB. Put on the important stuff - photos, docs, notes and skip the overall system backups except once in a while. Inexpensive bare device writers are available and work just fine sitting bare on your desk with a SATA-USB3 external adapter for the 1X monthly that you run a backup.

lrem 6y ago

A safe in the cellar, under the 4 weeks worth of food and water reserve, seems about right.

monkeynotes 6y ago

Faraday cages around anything electronic that you care about. Honestly though, your digital media is going to be the last thing you are going to care about as you are starving to death with no water, heat, power, and armed people roaming the streets looking to take all your provisions. Your faraday or powered down devices also won't prevent them getting destroyed in a neighbourhood going up in fire either.

kwhitefoot 6y ago

I think it would be safe. In the Carrington event the damage was caused by currents induced in long wires. Of course we have a lot more long wires now so the problems would be correspondingly larger. I suspect that more damage would be caused by secondary effects than the direct effect of the induced currents. Some power lines would trip out and this would add extra load to other circuits which would trip out even if not affected by the direct effects of coronal mass ejection. In a poorly designed or poorly maintained power distribution system this will cause a cascade of failure that can disable power supplies and communications over a huge area. This sort of cascading failure happened in the US North East in 2003, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003. See https://www.wired.com/2011/09/0902magnetic-storm-disrupts-telegraphy-carrington-event/ https://www.wired.com/2011/09/0902magnetic-storm-disrupts-te... for some first hand comments.

jaycroft 6y ago

The danger from CMEs comes from very very large scale current loops (thousands of miles in perimeter, hundreds of square miles in enclosed area). The issue is a slowly varying but intense change in magnetic flux. We're not talking even as strong as the earth's magnetic field, but over a large encircled area you can get one hell of an EMF. This is bad for power lines. This can also be bad for thousand foot tall AM radio towers and their conductive guywires. This is not a problem for your cell phone. Your hard drive, even if it is legacy spinning metal in a live laptop disconnected from your wall power will not notice any more than it will notice you setting your credit card down on the palm rest, from some basic order of magnitude on the change in dB/dt.

GnarfGnarf 6y ago

Back up to DVD.

rmilk 6y ago
I found BluRay-R double or quad sided is truly affordable and gives up to 50-100 GB per disc. Cost is < $2 per disc for 50 GB. Put on the important stuff - photos, docs, notes and skip the overall system backups except once in a while. Inexpensive bare device writers are available and work just fine sitting bare on your desk with a SATA-USB3 external adapter for the 1X monthly that you run a backup.