My favourite little bird, the lowly barn swallow. Incredibly social, they gather on the power lines and twitter at each other when a storm is coming. Lightning fast, and voracious mosquito eaters, and they keep their nests incredibly clean, carrying out their droppings from the building.
I love barn swallows.
I’ve got one of those KeepConnect smart plugs which monitors a few different external servers and their own cloud, and automatically power cycles its outlet if things don’t work. They’ve damn near doubled in price since I’ve bought mine but it does work very well for me. Annual fee is reasonable too.
I could build something similar but I have too many projects as it is, and I feel I’d be fiddling with it endlessly just because I can. This is literally set and forget and in the last 2y it’s cycled the outlet 48 times, most of them in the middle of the night, presumably with my cable provider maintenance windows.
I don’t do full disk encryption on my backups. I use duplicity and encrypt the backups with three gpg keys: one that is for the IT department with a known passphrase, one for the business with a different known passphrase, and my personal key.
I’m a one man show but I set this up with the future in mind. Different data might not have all three keys, but this arrangement allows me to spin off bits of the data management as needed. The passphrases can be changed as/when needed without invalidating old backups.
Combined with ssh certificates it helps organize my IT needs.