How to Ensure High Availability When You Work From Home

by Howard Fosdick Updated for ©2025
RexxInfo.org

If you're like me, you've probably worked from home for years, at least in off-hours.

With the COVID-19 crisis, millions more have joined us. Teachers, accountants, librarians, stockbrokers ... you name it, these workers now operate either full- or part- time from their homes.

Even after the coronavirus crisis ends, many will continue working at home, at least part-time.

What happens when the home worker's computer fails? Whether the device is a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop -- and whether the problem is hardware or software -- the result could be missed work days and lots of frustration.

This article explores how to ensure high-availability home computing. Open source software is key. It offers device independence so that home workers can easily move between primary and backup devices.

Most importantly, it gives users control of their environment: the surest route to high availability. I'll present a simple open source based high availability strategy that you can easily modify for your own needs.

Different Strategies for Different Situations

One point needs to be emphasized upfront: different job functions require different solutions.

Some at-home workers use smartphones or tablets, while others rely on laptops or desktops. Some could tolerate an outage of hours or even days, while others must be available without interruption. Some use company-supplied devices; others must provide their own. Lastly, some home workers store their data in their company's cloud, while others self-manage their data.

Obviously, no single high-availability strategy fits everyone. So this article can't tell you "the answer." Instead it prompts you to think about the challenges involved, if you haven't already, and presents some ideas to help you prepare before disaster strikes.

Defining High Availability

Whatever computing device a home worker uses, high availability (HA) involves five interoperable components:

Device hardware
System software
Communications capability
Applications or apps
Data

The HA plan must encompass all five components to succeed. Missing any one component causes HA failure.

For example, last night I worked on a cloud-based spreadsheet. If my communications link had failed and I couldn't access my cloud data, that would stop my work on the project... even if I had all other HA components available in a backup computer.

Of course, there are exceptions. Say last night's spreadsheet was stored on my local computer. If that device failed, I could have kept working if I had a backup computer with my data, even it lacked internet access.

To succeed as a high-availability home worker, then, you must first identify the components you require for your work. Then develop a plan to continue working if one or more fail.

One approach is to create a duplicate replacement. Having available the exact same hardware, software, communications, apps, and data available in a backup device guarantees you can work if your primary fails. This approach is simple, though it might cost more to keep a complete backup on tap.

To economize, share computers with your family or flatmates. A shared backup is always more cost effective than a dedicated backup, so long as you have top priority on the shared computer if you need it.

The alternative to duplicate replacement is a functional replacement. You substitute a working equivalent for the failed component. Say I'm working from my home laptop and connecting through home wifi. My internet connection fails. Perhaps I can tether my computer to my phone and use the cellphone network instead. I achieve HA by replacing one technology with an equivalent.

Beyond the five HA components, be sure to identify any special requirements you have. For example, if mobility is important, you might need to replace a broken laptop with another laptop, not a desktop.

High availability means identifying all the functions you need. Then ensure your HA plan covers them all.

Timing, Planning, and Testing

You must also define your time frame for recovery. Must you be able to continue your work immediately after a failure? Or do you have the luxury of some down time during which you can react?

The longer your allowable downtime, the more options you have. For example, if you could miss work for several days, you could simply trot a broken device into a repair shop. No need for a backup.

In this article, by "high availability," I mean getting back to work in very short order after a failure, perhaps less than one hour.

This typically requires that you have access to a backup device that is immediately available and ready-to-go. While there might be occasions when you can recover your primary device in a matter of minutes -- for example, by working around a failure, or by quickly replacing a defective piece of hardware or software -- a backup computer is normally part of the HA plan.

High availability requires planning and preparation. "Winging it" won't suffice. Ensure your backup plan works by testing it beforehand.

For example, say your data resides in the cloud. That data is accessible from anywhere, from any device. That sounds ideal. But ... oops! You forgot that there was a small but vital bit of data stored locally on your failed computer. If you can't access that essential data, your HA plan fails. A dry run surfaces problems like this.

Smartphone Backup?

Most of us in software engineering and support work with laptops and desktops at home. Smartphones and tablets are useful adjuncts, but they aren't at the core of what we do.

The main reasons are screen size and keyboard. For software work you can't achieve the same level of productivity with a small screen and touch-screen keypad as you can with a large monitor and physical keyboard.

If you normally use a laptop or desktop and opt for a smartphone or tablet as your backup, test it out beforehand to make sure it suffices. Here's an example of the kind of subtlety that might otherwise trip you up. Zoom runs on both smartphones and laptops/desktops. Yet the mobile app differs in small but important ways. Mobile Zoom often doesn't work so well for sharing charts or documents, it's limited in how many meeting participants you can view at one time, and chat is harder to use.

Smartphones make convenient backup devices because everyone has one. But if you depend on yours, use it for work one day to verify that it meets your needs.

Data Accessibility

Data access is vital when your primary device fails.

Cloud storage enables you to access your data from any device at any location. Services include transparent data back up and recovery, security, encryption, and other features. Here are several free cloud storage providers for Linux.

Of course, cloud storage is only going to work for you if you still have a live communications path to it after a failure event. Nor does cloud storage meet the privacy and security specifications of all projects.

Spend some time learning about your cloud vendor's services to see how they fit your HA plans. Find out what level of availability your provider promises, then check their track record in achieving it. And be sure to devise an alternate way to access your cloud if your primary communications link fails.

If you store your data on a local device, you'll be responsible for backing it up and recovering it. Back up your data to an alternate device, and verify that you can restore it within your time frame. This is your time-to-recovery. You'll have to secure that data as well, and meet any privacy requirements.

Consider how much data you can afford to lose in the event of a outage. For example, if you back up your data nightly, you could lose up to a maximum of one day's work (all the work completed during the day prior to the nightly backup.) So you must also consider backup data timeliness.

Open source offers many free applications for local data backup and recovery. BackupPC, Bacula, Back In Time, rsnapshot, rsync, and others come to mind. Timeshift backs up the operating system itself.

Many prefer a data strategy that combines both cloud and local storage. Store your data locally and then use the cloud as a convenient backup. Or vice versa. Storing your data in two separate locations gives your data geographical redundancy -- useful if either site becomes unavailable.

With a little forethought, you can devise a simple plan to access your data regardless of any outage.

My Strategy: Open Source Software on Generic Hardware

As a practical example, I'll describe my own HA approach. My goals are a time-to-recovery of an hour or less, and backup data timeliness to within a day.

Hardware: I use an Android smartphone for phone calls and audio conferences. I can access a backup phone from another family member if my primary fails. Unfortunately, my phone's small size and touch keyboard mean I can't use it as my backup computer.

Instead, I rely on a few generic desktop computers that have standard, interchangeable parts. You can easily maintain such hardware with my simple free how-to guide. You don't need any hardware experience.

Open source software makes my multi-box strategy affordable. OSS runs so efficiently that even ten-year-old computers work fine as backups for typical office work. Mine are early multi-core desktops with a minimum of four gigabytes of memory and any disk that cleanly verifies. These are so inexpensive you can often get them for free from recycling centers or even the trash (see my article on how to codge free computer parts here.

Another way to economize is to designate other family member's computers as your shared backups.

Systems Software and Apps: I run open source software on top of this generic hardware for several benefits. First, OSS flexibility enables me to address any possible software failure. For example, with simple operating system commands I can copy, move, back up, and recover the operating system, applications, and my data across partitions or disks or computers. I don't have to worry about software constraints, vendor lock-in, proprietary backup file formats, licensing or activation restrictions, or extra fees.

Of course, if you prefer to automate backup and recovery, open source software offers numerous free tools. But you're not forced to use one. You have options.

Another open source benefit is that you control your operating system.

If you don't, you could be subject to forced restarts, forced updates, and forced upgrades. My relative has run into such problems more than once. Without his knowledge or consent, his computer suddenly launched a fatal forced upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. This cost him three days of lost income... and untold grief. On Windows 10, he's since faced update problems like the one that deleted his data.

The lesson: your vendor's agenda may not coincide with your own.

All operating systems have bugs. The difference is that open source software doesn't force you to eat them.

Data: I use very simple techniques to make my data highly available.

I can't use cloud services for my data due to privacy requirements. Instead, my data "master copy" resides on an USB-connected disk. I plug it into any of several computers. After every session, I back up altered data to the computer I used.

Of course, this approach is only feasible if your backups run quickly. For most home workers, that's easy. All you have to do is segregate your data by size and how frequently you update it.

Isolate big files like photos, audio, and video into separate folders or partitions. Make sure you only back up files that are newly-added, not older items that have already been backed up.

Much of my work involves office suites. These generate small files. So I just isolate each project in its own folder. For example, I stored the two dozen files I used to write this article in a single subdirectory. Backing it up is as simple as copying that folder.

A little thought about data segregation and backing up only modified files ensures quick, easy backups for most home workers. My approach is dead simple; it works best if you only work on a couple projects in a session. And I can tolerate losing up to a day's work. If you need something more sophisticated, open source offers a plethora of free products. You can easily automate more refined backups with them.

For software development, I take an entirely different approach: I use a cloud-based software versioning product. It transparently handles all software backup issues for me and coordinates with other developers. My HA planning in this area just focuses on ensuring I can access the online tool.

Communications: Like many home users, I communicate through both a cell phone network and the internet. If my internet goes down, I can use the cell network instead by tethering my laptop to my Android smartphone. If the cell network is unavailable, I can use any of several open source video chat programs, alternatives to Zoom, texting, and email on my home computer instead.

If I lose all home connections, I would trot my laptop to the local library or coffee shop hotspot.

My High Availability Strategy

Failure Experiences

Using my strategy for fifteen years, how have I fared? What failures did I experience and how did they turn out?

1. Motherboard Burnout: One day my computer wouldn't turn on. I simply moved my USB "master data" external disk to another computer, and used that. I lost no data.

After work hours, I investigated the problem. Using this free fix-it guide, I determined it was a motherboard failure. I scrapped the computer and used it for parts.

2. Drive Failure: An internal disk failed while I was working. I just moved my USB master disk to a backup computer. I lost ten minutes of data updates.

After work, I created a new boot disk by copying one from another computer -- flexibility that only OSS offers. I used the affected computer the next day.

3. Fatal Software Update: A Linux update caused a failure to start the Login service. I shifted to a backup computer where I hadn't yet applied the fatal update, and didn't lose any data.

After work, googling helped me solve this problem in an hour. I should add that while I've encountered the occasional Linux bug over the years, this is the only fatal update I've received in fifteen years. That kind of reliability makes open source software the premier choice for high availability.

4. Monitor Burnout: My monitor fizzled out. I just swapped in a backup display and kept working. This took ten minutes. After work I determined that the problem was a burned-out capacitor, so I recycled the monitor.

5. Power Outage: Now here's a situation I didn't plan for! A tornado took down the electrical power in our entire town for two days. I learned that one should think through all possible contingencies -- including alternate work sites.

Conclusion

If you work from home, you need to consider what will happen when your home computer fails. If not, you could experience frustrating workdays off while you scramble to fix the problem.

Tens of millions of workers operate at least part-time from their homes. How many have even considered their vulnerability?

For most, ensuring high availability is very simple. The trick is thinking about it in advance. Create a plan and then test it.

Open source software is the key. It runs so efficiently on older, cheaper computers that they become affordable backup machines. It offers device independence. Ultimately, controlling your own hardware and software gives you the surest chance to achieve high availability -- and that's exactly what OSS offers.

With a little forethought, you can achieve high availability at home, simply and at very low cost.