I run my own cloud on servers here at my house. So I don't need internet, just my local LAN to get to any of my information. But I do need power. I have a gasoline generator for that. And if push comes to shove, I could pull the batteries out of our cars and use the small inverter we have in the truck.

If I had to go mobile, I would grab my dedicated backup system. That is very small - a 4Tb disk in an external USB enclosure that plugs into a Raspberry Pi. It backs up all of the computers in our house. The backups use flat files and symlinks, so it doesn't require any special software to access them (although using the backup software running on the Pi indeed makes things much faster and easier).

Every now and then I make paper printouts of the most critical information and put those in a file cabinet. That is in case I bite it, and leave my wife sitting here staring at a little Pi single board computer running Linux and wondering how she's going to retrieve backups off of this foreign system (foreign to her, that is). It's running headless (no monitor, no keyboard attached) so that would make it even tougher for her.

I need to do some more thinking about this situation where I might not be around. As I type this, I see that my plans pretty much rely on having a Linux and network experienced person at the helm. My wife does fine on her computers, but she's not going to have any idea how to SSH into a Linux box, find her files, and get them copied across the network to her Windows computers. Hmmm... looks like I need to do some more planning!

Anybody - do you have and ideas how to handle stuff like this where one spouse is the computer guru and the other is just a basic user? What happens if the guru bites it? You might have the best backup system on the planet, but if the spouse doesn't know how to locate and use it, they're kind of out of luck.