Single Points of Failure: A Household Audit

Engineers audit systems for single points of failure — the one component whose loss takes everything down with it. Households never get this audit. So I gave mine one. Method: list every system my family depends on, identify the single component or party whose failure breaks it, and grade the blast radius.

Sixteen findings. Here are the four criticals and what I did about them, with numbers.

Critical 1: Email

Every account recovery flow in my life terminated at one inbox, run by one company, governed by terms I've never fully read. Losing that inbox meant losing, by my count, 214 downstream accounts.

Remediation: custom domain, mail hosted with a paid provider, full mailbox synced nightly to a machine I own. The domain is the identity; the provider is now a replaceable part. Migration cost: 6.5 hours and $54/year. Downstream accounts re-pointed: 214 of 214, over three weekends.

Critical 2: Photos

19 years of family photos, one cloud account, zero local copies. My entire visual memory was a subscription.

Remediation: 3-2-1 backup. Three copies, two media types, one offsite. A NAS in the office closet, an encrypted drive in a relative's house two states away, and yes — the cloud can stay, demoted from single point of failure to redundant third copy. 412 GB migrated. Restore test performed and timed: 41 minutes to first photo, which is the number that actually matters. A backup you haven't restored from is a rumor.

Critical 3: Money movement

Not savings — movement. Payroll in, mortgage out, all through accounts at a single institution that can freeze, flag, or fail. Probability low; blast radius total.

Remediation: second account at an unrelated institution with 60 days of fixed costs, plus a measured amount of self-custodied bitcoin — the amount is logged, the thesis is simple: some fraction of money should require no one's permission to move. I rebalance quarterly and record the ratio. Redundancy is not paranoia. Redundancy is what every serious system has.

Critical 4: The internet connection itself

Work, school, phone calls (VoIP), thermostat — one coax cable. A backhoe two streets over once took my household offline for 31 hours. I measured, of course.

Remediation: 5G failover router from a different carrier on a different physical network. Automatic cutover, tested monthly. Observed failover time: 40 seconds. Cost: $22/month. That is what I pay to make a backhoe someone else's problem.

The scoreboard

Finding	Before	After
Email	1 provider, 214 dependents	Portable domain, nightly sync
Photos	1 copy	3 copies, 2 media, 1 offsite
Money	1 institution	2 institutions + self-custody
Connectivity	1 cable	2 carriers, 40 s failover

Total spend: about $31/month in new recurring costs and one long month of weekends. In exchange, no single company, cable, or account can take down the household. The remaining twelve findings are lower severity — car keys, prescription refills, the garage door's cloud dependency (genuinely absurd) — and I'll work through them in future entries.

Audit your house. Write down what you find. The number of criticals will surprise you, and you can't fix a number you haven't written down.