South Africans don't need convincing that the grid fails — we schedule our lives around it. But most load-shedding advice stops at “buy a power bank.” The real damage of an outage isn't darkness. It's interrupted writes — the document that corrupts when the desktop dies mid-save, the router that drops during a backup, the security system that blinks offline.
Think in layers, not gadgets
Layer 1 — Power: a small UPS on the router and one charged power station beats a garage of gadgets. The goal isn't running the house; it's a clean shutdown and a live connection.
Layer 2 — Data: outages kill drives more often than age does. Sudden power loss during a write cycle is a classic corruption cause — which is why the 3-2-1 backup rule matters more here than almost anywhere on earth. One of your copies should be offline entirely — an air-gapped vault doesn't care what Eskom does.
Layer 3 — Signal: towers have batteries, but extended outages drain them — and suddenly “no lights” becomes “no network.” That's the scenario off-grid comms and mesh networking exist for: communication that doesn't ask a tower for permission.
The complete system
The full layer-by-layer buildout — checklists, budgets, and the order to do it in — is The Grid-Down Playbook, and the whole framework lives in The Stack. Load-shedding is the rest of the world's worst-case scenario running as your weekly drill. Build like it.