Documentation methodology drift and robustness

 Back in February, I blogged about how I was now saving data directly to OneDrive rather than backing it up and uploading it at the end of the day.

And this certainly has proven to be a robust solution, except last week when the internet was off again.

Like last time, the router was in a locked room to which I didn't have a key, which meant I couldn't intervene. Just to make matters worse the router said that it was there, but refused to connect to the NBN.

My solution, after trying to use my phone as a router (bad idea, OneDrive synchronisation chews batteries) was to turn off synchronisation and revert to the original methodology of saving copies to both my computer and a USB stick.

That worked well, and all I had to do when I got home was power up my documentation laptop and restore synchronisation, and a gigabyte or so of data later we were all good.

Today, when I came in, the router was still being stupid and was still inaccessible. However I'd come prepared, and brought my little 4G travel modem in as a backup.

That just worked - apart from a little bit of a lag (and only sometimes) when saving a document you couldn't tell I was running over a 4G connection rather than a standard NBN connection.

As for data usage, I've gone through a Gigabyte this morning, and I'll guesstimate that I'll use the same this afternoon, which is not too bad at all

which rather neatly proves it would be possible to do documentation in the field using my methodology relying on a 4G modem alone