I’d planned on publishing photos and a little story today about our second week in Cuba.

Sadly one of a digital nomads worst fears struck me yesterday. No, not digestive malaise. Although I am just getting over a minor bout of that, this is far far worse.

Laptop death sucks when you’re 100% dependent on it for your livelihood. When you’re a digital nomad it’s even worse because getting it fixed rarely means popping into your neighbor Apple store and getting 24 hour or faster turn around on a repair.

Multiple Levels of Redundancy

Being a fairly experienced nomad, almost 10 years now, I do have multiple levels of digital redundancy. Elena has encouraged me to blog about for quiet some time, so now seems like an awfully good time to at least touch on that!

Data Loss Protection

First, I have a Time Machine backup on an external hard drive. That hard drive also gets packed separately from my laptop when in transit, so that just in case one bag goes missing everything doesn’t disappear at once. AKA don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Second, I clone my hard drive in it’s entirety to that same external hard drive about once a month. There are a few folders (music/podcasts/TV/Movies) that I don’t bother backing up with Time Machine and frankly nothing beats having a bootable copy of your own hard drive for troubleshooting or in an emergency.

Not terribly relevant but that hard drive also has a third partition that just stores junk I carry around but have no need to backup (virtual machines for testing, old photos backed up elsewhere, movies I carry around on the off chance someday I’ll watch them, etc).

Third, I have a TimeMachine backup at home on my file server. Although that is now months out of date it’s better than nothing. I also have a backup of my “irreplaceables” on that file server like photos. Finally, yes, that file server itself gets backed up to an external drive at home too (keep meaning to move that to the cloud).

So with ALL that I don’t really worry about losing “data” and you wouldn’t either if you setup some basic mostly automated practices like these. Maybe you don’t need to go so far, but if you’re traveling for more than a couple weeks at the very minimum you should be traveling with a time machine backup on an external hard drive just in case and a backup elsewhere just in case in case.

Productivity Loss Protection

What I do worry about is losing productivity. No computer means no work. No work means no income. No income means no fun…

I have some redundancy there are well.

First, I travel with an newish iPhone 6 and an old iPad (mostly for ebooks/RSS reader). Either means I wouldn’t loose 24/7 access to email and Slack without a computer and I could function a little to at least temporarily get info out as needed.

Second, I travel with Elena… while that sometimes when it comes to technology she’s far more of a liability than a resource, here she’s definitely a resource. I could plug that hard drive clone I have directly into her laptop, boot it up and go. Albeit a bit slowly slower than off my internal SSD, but I could get some work done without really breaking much of a sweat. However “hijacking/sharing” her laptop for any lengthy period of time however would probably be the one thing that could break our relationship.

Third, I travel with a lot of credit cards. I know that sounds like I’m joking, but I’m serious and in a pinch I wouldn’t hesitate to by a replacement computer. If you’re making your living through a tool, you’d better be prepared at any moment to replace that broken tool. On that front it’s also worth noting that both my renters insurance policy (which covers my possessions globally) includes loss/theft/peril of all my gear.

Getting Things Fixed in Faraway Lands Part 1

I should probably start by explaining that little ribbing I gave elena above about being a liability as it’s rather germaine to this post. Exactly one year ago Elena’s MacBook Pro suffered a nearly identical failure to mine yesterday while we were in Cortona, Italy. She however didn’t have a clone of her hard drive and her TimeMachine backups was weeks out of date (I literally have to remind her weekly to plug it in and keep up it up to date… which she used to ignore, but I put a clause in our pre-nup that she has to run a backup once a week — j/king).

To fix her laptop we had to travel from Cortona to Florence (2 hours each way by bus/train) to the nearest Apple Store. Where upon our first visit I had to buy an external hard drive enclosure, pull her hard drive out myself in the food court of the mall put it in the enclourse and use my working laptop to clone her hard drive to yet another external drive. After which I put the original hard drive back in the computer and turned it over to Apple support for the board replacement before traveling back to Cortona to wait. While we waited she was able to plug that cloned HD into my MBP and get some work done, not full speed, but at least something with her apps, docs and universe available to her. A few days later we got the call that her laptop was fixed, again 2 hours each way, really more like 6 hours round trip to Florence to pick it up and US$600 out of pocket (ouch Italian VAT) before we resumed life as normal. Well as normal for us.

Getting Things Fixed in Faraway Lands Part 2

The good news this time, is my Late 2013 15″ Retina MacBook Pro still has AppleCare. The bad news is that there are no Apple Stores in the Dominican Republic. I did try stopping by iZone the nearby authorized Apple authorized retailer and was told 2-3 weeks for a repair 🙁

The delightful surprise however is that my Asus MB168b+* USB travel monitor is unaffected by the video failure. So, for now I’m working ghetto like this.

Two things on that photo: Yes, that’s the Asus MB168b+ I’ve raved about endlessly propped up in front of my useless rMBP screen, and yes, I often write my blog posts in Sublime Text.

So, wait if it’s working why no post on Cuba? Well, because while most things work, Lightroom can only browse photos it can not edit photos. I presume it needs to use the fried dedicated graphics card/memory.

Thankfully, we are flying to Philadelphia Wednesday to attend WordCamp US December 5-6 and I’ve already made an appointment at the Apple Store in Philly for an hour after we land. I’ve got my fingers crossed that they can fix it overnight, but we’ll be in Philly for 2 weeks and worst case I’m sure they have shiny new MacBooks for sale, just not the 15″ MacBook Air I keep dreaming about and waiting for.

Stories, advice and more welcome in the comments!

* Note: I’ve linked to the MB168b+, but Asus just released a new (although nearly identical as far as I can tell) Asus 169b+. I’ll be getting a MB169b+ in the next couple months and doing a side by side comparison.

It’s now de rigeur, the first thing I do in any given country is buy a prepaid data SIM card for my phone. If I can I do it before I even walk out of the airport, all the better.  When I arrive late at night and walk out of the airport when everything is closed, it’s still the first thing on my agenda in the morning is to find a phone shop.

There is a lot of variability to the plans, rules and costs between the countries. All of the non-US countries I’ve traveled to though is still closer to one another, when it comes to prepaid SIM cards than they any are to the mess that the US is for prepaid mobile. The US remains by comparison outrageously expensive and makes purchasing prepaid plans outright punitive compared to postpaid plans.

I bought that little sim card case and ejector tool on Amazon. You can find it here, however while I like it I will probably soon replace it with a bigger one that holds more nano sized sim cards like this one here.

3G Prepaid Data in Spain

In Spain it took some hunting to find an affordable plan. In the end we bought Yogio 2GB data only prepaid sim cards. I think 30 Euros each, valid 30 days. It was OK, but probably should have bought Tuenti/Movistar. That’s one thing, sometimes in hindsight you realize there was a better option. Still, something is ALWAYS better than nothing.

3G Prepaid Data in Bulgaria

In Sofia, Bulgaria two providers (VivaCom and Max) refused to sell a prepaid data plan to a foreign national. Strange. Just to be clear, I could buy a SIM with voice only service from them by showing my passport, I just couldn’t get data added to it or by itself. Thanks to a tip from friends at WordCamp Europe I found a Globul shop that would sell me a PrePaid 2GB Data only SIM valid for 7 days, for 10 Bulgarian Lev (5 Euros). Perfect! It rocked. Most of the time getting about 10Mbps up/down throughout Sofia.

Data Only

A note here. I say I buy data only plans, but there us usually some remaining balance on the SIM after doing that and that remaining credit can be used for pay as you go voice minutes and text messaging. There is just no reason for me to buy even a 100 minute voice plan when I’m unlikely to use 2 minutes of voice calling so data only works fine.  Usually whatever we do is data based anyway, ie. iMessage, Viber, WhatsApp or Skype. Oh, and FYI pay-as-you go texting is usually pennies outside the US. In the US my AT&T pay as you go text messaging in $0.25/message and $.50/multimedia message.  Gizmodo has quick article on AT&T’s SMS pricing here.

3G Prepaid Data in Italy

In  I’d initially planned on getting a TIM or Vodafone prepaid data plan in Italy, but out of convenience (shop actually open) and at someone’s suggestion (whom was nice but non-techincal and I should not have listened to) I ended up getting us 2 SIM cards from Wind. That was a big mistake. 30 Euros for each for a 10GB plan and the coverage is horrible… We often had no signal in Rome, when we had a signal it would often it drop from 3G down to Edge, which is too slow to even check bus arrivals times. So after a few days I sucked it up and bought another SIM Card, this one from TIM, 10GB of 4G/LTE for 1 month, 30 Euros, plus 10 for the sim card which includes 5 Euros credit. After a month in Italy I can say Tim was better everywhere, but we managed to make use of Wind.  Hopping between the two we managed decent coverage we can tether our computer too when off of WiFi and I was reminded why I like Elena and I to get sims from different carriers whenever possible.

3G Prepaid Data in Poland

Rather spontaneously I went to Poland for the weekend from Italy.  If you know me, you know a WordCamp was obviously involved.  At the airport in Warsaw I got on Wifi and asked a friend already at WordCamp Warsaw if there was a recommend data sium provider.  I got impatient for his reply though and quickly bought a 2GB Data only sim from Lycomobile for 10 Zloty (US$4).  It’s been great throughout Warsaw, often seeing 10-20Mbps.

Understanding Prepaid Data

The plans are always a little complicated to understand. Sometimes you pay for the SIM, but get credit on it from the start, sometimes the SIM is free but only with an activation fee. Whatever, it’s usually 5 euros or less. Then you buy whatever data allotment you want.

OMG! APNs!

Many thanks to Sam in the comments for reminding me to mention this important tip!

Often you’ll slip a new sim card into your phone and the vendor will tell you that it can take 10 minutes or an hour for it to start working.  This is true and not unusual.  There is one thing you want to check though before you walk away, the APN.

Typically the APN is auto-configured on your phone, sometimes however it doesn’t work on foreign phones.  The APN is unique to each provider though and that’s why you want to check it and find out what it is before you walk away, just in case yours isn’t auto-configured.  Your data won’t work at all until it’s set either manually or via the auto-detection routines.  It’s something you should get familiar with just in case, but the vendor will almost always know how to check it for you and set it for you if necessary.  You’ll almost always have to ask the vendor to do that though as they’ll assume the auto-configure will work.  More than once I’ve had to make a trip back to the phone store to find out what the APN is because data hasn’t started working hours later.

Digital Safety Nets

When we’ll be somewhere more than a week I generally choose the highest allotment available.  I know in those scenarios will eventually want to tether out computers while riding a bus or train and we’ll often end up staying somewhere where WiFi is so weak or sub-par that tethering is far preferable.

I remember in Indonesia (Bali) 3G data was delightfully inexpensive. However, we would have to go top up every few days because we burned through data so fast tethering all the time and could only top up with 1 or 2 GB at a time.

It’s one of our many “digital safety nets” that let us work and roam the world at the same time.

I’ve talked a lot about the contingency plans for being a digital nomad, I’d love to hear some of the things you do and think about in the comments. I ‘m already working on a post for “What happens when hardware dies in a foreign land”