This article reminds me in particular of my long-open question about how to prepare for solar storms. But now I have a new question. If the way to prepare my electronics for a solar storm is to put them in a cardboard- and aluminium-foil-lined faraday cage -- what happens to all the hard disks in the cloud? Do any cloud providers have offline tape backups in faraday cages?
This isn't just about recovering after how many ever days or weeks without power. It's whether you have any data left _to_ restore. Somebody tell me I don't need to worry.
Solar storms don't work like that. It's not the movie-like electronics blow up left and right thing. It's quasi-DC currents in the ground thing.
What that means is that the power grid is designed for AC currents, and now there will be DC currents flowing through it, induced by the flexing of the Earth's magnetic field under the storm. That is very likely to saturate the cores in large scale transformers, causing them to blow up.
No more power grid. And these are not things you have spares for or can ship from China. You need to make new ones, in a country with spotty power and complete supply chain breakdown.
So your electronics would be fine, just out of power. Faraday cages are for the nuclear bomb type EMP events.
This isn't just about recovering after how many ever days or weeks without power. It's whether you have any data left _to_ restore. Somebody tell me I don't need to worry.