The thing with working for a startup at a permanent WFH set up is that I have to take on a number of roles, IT being one of them. Not only do I have to manage our entire stack of cloud services, but I also have to maintain my own local infrastructure at home.
Some overdue penny-pinching required me to kill off some unnecessary cloud accounts but that’d mean backing up all the data first. This also coincided with my scheduled quarterly back up of my work files. All in all, this involved around a terabyte of data.
Since good backup practice requires copying, the data to at least three locations (another cloud storage, a copy to my local machine, and another to an external storage), the task required a bit of effort which was compounded considering my current set up wasn’t built for such tasks.
You see, my home office is located at the shittiest spot signal-wise. It’s the most enclosed space in the house and the walls are a foot of solid concrete. It’s a dead spot for mobile networks and, even with wireless mesh set up, I only get less than a fifth of our broadband speed since signal has to bounce at least two nodes. It has worked okay for my day-to-day stuff, but not for moving around that much data over the Internet.
Again, I had to defile the Sabbath and fiddle around the house to fix my set up. The plan was to get my workstation connected with as few hops as possible. Getting even half our subscribed speed would greatly reduce the time needed to transfer the data.
So, I got an additional mesh node with a gigabit port, positioned it at the window of the adjacent room closest to the main router, and hooked it up to the network. I then got a 10-meter outdoor ethernet cable, hooked it up the new node, ran it through the window, snaked it where I can, then down a floor to my office, and into my workstation’s port. Voila. 350 Mbps up and down.
Fortunately, I was able to do it without getting nicked or scratched, which has been fairly common whenever I work on something in the house these past couple of years. Getting too old for this shit.
For good measure, I added an 8 TB hard drive to my workstation to store all that crap. I don’t think the data’s all that important, really. But hey, you’d never know if some obscure file from a decade ago would be material in the future, especially since we’re in the business of turnarounds.
Anyway, I should consider creating my own NAS or file server so I can automate these things eventually.