My netbook broke the other day, which is why there's been a six-day gap in Dercuano. I suspect what went wrong is not actually the disk, so the extra stuff I'd written that night and not yet pushed to GitLab is probably recoverable, but it reminded me again of the precarious and janky state of my informatic infrastructure. I'm writing this on a different netbook with a nearly-shot battery and a Wi-Fi chip that keeps crashing. I'm going to have to reboot it to push this.
Normal people are using Google Docs, Apple's iCloud, and things like that more and more because of problems like this, despite the (to me) obvious security problems.
Ideally I would have a unified namespace of my data, including downloaded databases like this Wikipedia ZIM file and fairly ephemeral data like browser and editor state, with a local cache of it (and pending updates) on each user-interface device I have (netbooks, desktops, hand computers, whatever). Then each piece of data would also be replicated to different storage devices, which might be pendrives, file servers, or encrypted blobs in S3 buckets. The underlying model would be something like Secure Scuttlebutt mixed with git-annex, but the user interface would hopefully be something a bit easier to use. Ideally the loss or breakage of a cellphone or netbook would be only a minor inconvenience limited to whatever data had been created on it since the last time it was synced with any surviving device.
Downloading large databases over the internet is best left to a Raspberry Pi server on an always-on internet connection, not my laptop or hand computer. Syncing the downloaded database onto my laptop over The local connection, once I'm in its proximity in person, should be fast and transparent.
As I said before, this extends to local app state, so ideally it should be straightforward to, on my laptop, open up the "what my phone is viewing" folder and then transfer the session state of whatever I was doing on the phone onto the laptop --- and vice versa.