From the Editor’s Desk: Offline ⭐

Back in late June and early July, my wife was on a cruise in Europe with her college roommate, and I was in Pennsylvania using the extra time to plow through a thorough update of the Windows 11 Field Guide that’s still ongoing. From a schedule perspective, we were about halfway through a two-month stay in the U.S. after having come back from Mexico City in mid-May, and we’d be returning there in mid-July. It was a busy time, with trips, doctor and other appointments, and a rush to catch up with the people and places we care about in PA. Plus, our normal day-to-day jobs. That never ends.

Anyway, I was working and didn’t want any distractions, but my phone buzzed with a notification from Blink, the app for the camera mounted on the balcony of our apartment in Mexico City. Blink notifies me only rarely, and it’s always for one of two reasons: It detected motion, usually because some bird decided the camera was a nice temporary perch, or because it had been disconnected from the network for 30 minutes and was still offline.

This time, it was offline, so I launched the Eero app to check in on the Wi-Fi network. Eero was offline as well, so this was either a power outage or an Internet problem. Power outages are unusual for our apartment in Mexico City, especially outages that last more than a second or two, but they can happen. Internet outages are even more unusual–our connection in Mexico is faster and more stable than what we have in PA–but we do have a strange problem, common in Mexico, that happens three or four times a year. Even though we’re on an auto-pay system, the amount that auto-pays is sometimes less than a dollar (U.S.) off the correct amount. And our Internet provider, TotalPlay, just turns off the connection. That they can automate correctly.

I didn’t know which issue we were experiencing, and there was no way for me to handle it myself if TotalPlay was at fault: Stephanie had set that up four years ago for reasons I can’t remember, and she deals with these things. (Comically, you can walk down to a local OXXO convenience store and pay the remainder of whatever bill in cash there, and the connection will come right back; if you pay it electronically, it could be hours or even the next day.) I figured I’d give it a while, but when I woke up the next morning and saw that our connection was still down, I texted Stephanie. Given the connectivity issues with her on the cruise, I knew nothing would be resolved quickly.

And I was right on that count, at least. She contacted TotalPlay multiple times while she was away but had difficulty getting through to anyone. Finally, she got on a WhatsApp chat with someone there who told her something unexpected. TotalPlay hadn’t shut us down because of the usual billing snafu. They had shut us down because of unusually high usage. They had never contacted us about this, not once, and they didn’t explain what that even meant.

Confronted by this information, I blamed myself. We have two Synology network attached storage devices (NASes), one in Mexico City and one in PA, and they sync with each other. When I originally set this up a year ago, both NASes were in PA on the same Ethernet network, so the initial sync of well under 3 TB of data occurred locally. Last fall, I brought one of the NASes to Mexico, and the two have been delta-syncing ever since. Successfully, from what I can tell.

Well. Successfully from the perspective of my data being in two different geographical locations. The thing is, even though the Synology NAS OS, called DiskStation Manager (DSM), is reasonably simple, it’s still fairly complex and can get even more so if you want to do things like run containers, use Plex or Jellyfin, or whatever else. Just the storage management is insanely complex, with far too many apps–File Station, Storage Manager, Synology Drive, Synology Drive ShareSync, and Synology Drive Admin Console–making it unclear which to use to perform whatever tasks. Long story short, I feel like I configured the first NAS, the one that’s now in Mexico, correctly, but there was something off about the second one.

For the short term, I was happy just to get them working and syncing across the continent. But in the intervening months, I’ve also tried to figure out what I had misconfigured on the NAS in Pennsylvania. This usually ended in some dead end that involved me having to contact Synology, which seemed like a non-starter. So I would give up and try again a month or two later, hoping that fresh eyes or whatever would trigger some epiphany.

During this time, I used the Synology Drive client to connect to the Mexico City NAS from my PCs and, less frequently, my phones and iPads. This is a DIY alternative to OneDrive, Google Drive, and the like, and while it wasn’t my original plan when I got the NASes, it worked much better than expected, and it became my go-to. But it was also part of that configuration problem: I couldn’t connect the Synology Drive client to the NAS in PA, and ideally the system would just automatically select whichever NAS was closest or had the better connectivity. But because the Mexico City NAS worked so well in this regard, it sort of didn’t matter. The two were syncing everything anyway.

That sync is not that big, basically just the contents of the To do, Book, and Code folders that I work out of daily, or somewhere between 8 and 12 GB at most. And I don’t even sync all of it usually since I organize everything logically in a way that minimizes the initial sync I do on each PC. Of course, there is one problem there: Because I review 20 to 25 PCs a year on average and am resetting PCs all the time and then configuring them anew, I’ve been syncing that data many more times than is immediately obvious. But this never seemed like an issue; it was quick and reliable, too, and to this moment, I don’t think that’s what TotalPlay saw and reacted to.

Instead, my suspicion–and that’s all I have because TotalPlay literally refused to discuss it–is that it was something else I did. In trying and retrying to figure out the configuration problem on the PA-based NAS, I finally went through the tedious process of bringing up the web-based Synology DSM interface for both NASes side-by-side so I could go through every single relevant interface across all those apps noted above to see exactly where they were configured differently. And while I can’t recall now which changes I made, we were in Nashville in mid-June when I thought I had solved the problem. I finally connected to the PA-based NAS using a Synology Drive client for the first time since I had separated the two NASes last September. This was a moment of great success, I thought.

When my wife had told me about the over-usage, I of course examined the PA-based NAS, since it was still online, in the hopes of seeing something that might explain what happened. I did not see that, but I shut down the NAS-to-NAS sync so that when or if the Mexico City NAS came back up, we wouldn’t be transmitting any data. I never did find anything odd there, but I do have a guess: Somehow, in reconfiguring the PA-based NAS, I probably triggered a full sync of all the data across the Internet. It’s the only thing that made sense, though even that amount of data seems reasonable to me. I didn’t understand them shutting us down and still don’t.

With my wife’s European adventure still ongoing, we exchanged text messages as possible and got a series of ever-gloomier news from TotalPlay. Despite some early assurances, the account was closed, and they were not reopening it. They would not discuss it further. So that was that.

I could have just moved to the PA-based NAS for Synology Drive sync. But I was starting to think that maybe my configuration changes weren’t 100 percent positive in nature, and I was thinking, not for the first time, that maybe what I really needed to do was wipe the thing out and start over. That would require me to bring the Mexico City NAS back to PA when we fly back in August, and so this would be a few months out at best. Regardless, this was unsettling. So I just decided to switch over to a normal Big Tech cloud storage solution for the time being. Which is easy enough.

We probably all play this game from time to time. I think of it as “If you had to.” That is, if you had to choose just one of anything, one music streaming service perhaps, one AI assistant, one whatever, which would you go with? In this case, the question was which Big Tech cloud storage solution I would choose. And the answer is surprisingly simple, despite the fact that OneDrive just comes with Windows 11 and auto-syncs the first time you bring it up on any PC. I chose Google Drive. Just as I had three years ago, thanks to the then-ongoing enshittification of Windows 11 and OneDrive, and for many of the same reasons.

Google Drive is faster and more reliable than OneDrive in Windows 11, which should be curious and maybe even alarming to just about anyone, including those at Microsoft responsible for those products. But Google Drive is also part of Google One, and I get much more storage with Google Drive, 5 TB, than I do with OneDrive, which is stuck at 1 TB and gets expensive if you need more. Which I do: As I write this, I’m using 90 percent of my OneDrive storage. It’s something I need to figure out. Like I need some other problem to solve.

Anyway, moving from Synology Drive to Google Drive, temporarily or not, was easy enough, especially since I just wanted to keep working with minimal interruptions. I installed the Google Drive client on a laptop that had the most complete sync of my now offline Mexico City NAS-based Synology Drive contents, configured it, and then just copied over the data. (I didn’t use the PA-based NAS contents because I didn’t know where things stood with sync.)

That’s a temporary fix for a big problem, a band-aid, but it was enough. Stephanie finished up her European trip, and I kept working, knowing my data was safe and up-to-date, albeit now in different places. It was OK, and it bought me some time. Stephanie came home on July 6, and we had a hectic week and a half of catching up with folks and getting our place ready for our absence, and then we flew to Mexico City on July 16, a Thursday. Awaiting us was an apartment with no Internet.

A day or two before we flew, Stephanie asked me what I was thinking about the Internet connection. We have many choices here, and while some things in Mexico are obviously behind the U.S. in some ways–like the bizarre auto-billing issue noted above–some things are well ahead of the U.S. And here in Mexico City, the Internet is one of those things. There are several Internet providers here, all with fiber-based symmetrical connections, and you can get 1 Gbps or faster speeds here from any of them. We were too busy to figure this out in PA last week, but I surprised her by saying we could just sign up with whatever service when we got there. We both have local cellular accounts with 20 Mbps of data per month in Mexico, and after all, we have strong connections in our apartment. If we had to, we could both live off those for days. No worries.

This is not the way I do things normally. I’m compulsive about this sort of thing, and I obsess over the smallest technical issues. But as noted in last week’s Ask Paul, traveling always stresses me out, and at every stage of this process, and I would be freaked out enough as it was. I just wanted to get here, get my normal Friday morning work done–First Ring Daily (FRD) with Brad, Ask Paul, and whatever else the world threw at me–and we would just figure it out.

I did have this background worry that it might take a day or some number of days to actually get a new Internet connection going. But even in a worst-case scenario, the first time I’d need a high-speed and reliable connection would be the following Wednesday, when I record Windows Weekly. So we had plenty of time. I thought.

You probably know what they say about the best laid plans, but you may not have considered what they say about the most poorly made plans. I discovered this on Friday morning. Brad begged off FRD because the two-hour time change interfered with some work meetings, so that was one thing I didn’t have to worry about. My iPad auto-connected to my iPhone’s hotspot so I could read the news. I connected a laptop as well. And then I started into Ask Paul, which I figured would be mostly offline work anyway because I usually answer whatever questions there are in the moment and often don’t need to reference anything online.

That was mostly true of Ask Paul this past Friday, and that was nice. But just the normal day-to-day stuff, emails coming in, my tech feed filling with whatever news was occurring, texting with Laurent over Slack, and so on, was curiously painful. I’ve tethered laptops to my phone more times than I can count in more places than I can count, and while there are obviously issues sometimes, the experience overall is usually positive. It works. You can get work done.

That is not what happened Friday morning. I kept getting connection time-outs everywhere despite my iPhone showing a solid 5 bars on the AT&T Mexico data connection. Cellular being cellular, I moved into the bedroom at some point just to be closer to the outdoors, thinking that perhaps that would help with whatever concrete-based interference I might have been experiencing in the living room. But nothing worked. I had to stop and restart the hotspot and disconnect and reconnect the Wi-Fi on the laptop multiple times just to get through what was a mostly offline Ask Paul. My wife was having the same issues.

This was beyond frustrating. For both of us, though probably more for me since I tend to feel these things harder and be more vocal about problems. But also because I had gone against character and decided to just let this one go and crush my inner compulsiveness for a change. Increasingly, I regretted this. I’m compulsive because of some mental health issue, I guess, ADHD or whatever, but there are benefits to being like this too. You’re never disappointed if you always assume the worst. Assuming the best, in this case, was a mistake, and I recognize the sadness of it reinforcing the way I usually am. I tried to do better and failed.

By mid-day, I had had enough. Stephanie recommended that I just sign up with TotalPlay again, which seemed borderline insane to me because they had just killed our account and had told her they would never reopen it; we have the same last name, and this is the same apartment in the same building. There is zero chance in the U.S. that you could ever pull such a stunt.

So I started by Googling the choices, of which there are many. I compared some prices, whittled down the list to 2 or 3, and started looking at what it would take to get a new Internet connection. The problems I experienced doing this were self-inflicted, as always, but the short version is that there was a final step where each of these companies needed to confirm my request via WhatsApp, and I never got any of the messages because I had forgotten to switch over WhatsApp on the iPhone to my Mexico phone number. Doy.

That’s dumb, and avoidable, but I wasn’t thinking clearly, and I was getting madder by the minute, with my ability to reason going into a nice death spiral. After hours of wasted time and frustration, I finally took my wife’s advice and looked at the TotalPlay website. It offers the same basic packages as the other providers I had tried to set up with. The package we had had before is for a 550 Mbps symmetrical connection for roughly $50 U.S. (though we typically saw closer to 800 Mbps each time I tested it). It let me step through the entire sign-up process, which is still bizarre to me. And then I hit that confirmation stage, where the system needed to confirm my registration via WhatsApp.

WhatsApp, I thought. Wait. Light finally dawned on the dim bulb that was my brain in that moment, and I opened WhatsApp on the iPhone and switched it to the Mexico number that I had never actually configured on this device. (I was using the Pixel 10 Pro XL when we left Mexico in May.) The confirmation code appeared immediately. F#$k me.

So I scheduled an install appointment. For that day. Something I had assumed would maybe take days anyway, and even more so given the lateness of the day and it being a Friday. But this could happen that day. Would have happened much earlier that day, sparing me from the stress, frustration, and high blood pressure I had no doubt caused. But it would happen that day regardless.

Still, I had doubts. Surely at some stage someone, the technician perhaps, or some person they communicated with back at the home office, would realize that a person with the exact last name of a person whose account had just been summarily executed was trying to set up a new account and put a stop to it. It would be justifiable, unlike the closing of the account. It wouldn’t surprise me.

But this did not happen. Two young guys showed up at 5:00 pm on a Friday. They examined the TotalPlay equipment I had–a router with Wi-Fi and a little TV set-top box I had disconnected long ago–told me I needed new equipment, and then went to the truck to get it. They replaced the hardware, did all the normal testing and initial configuration, and within 20 or 30 minutes, we were up and running. We have TV now, which I don’t care about, but the new TV box is bigger than the older one and acts as a router or switch too, which is interesting. The main router is likewise bigger and more powerful, with more Ethernet ports. And I can configure that through the TV interface, which is vaguely bizarre.

I paid them $999 Mexican pesos for the first month, and they left. My Eero network had come on immediately, so everything–my Blink camera, the Apple TV, the Pixel Tablet we use as a smart screen, and whatever else–just started working again too, like nothing had happened. I turned off the TotalPlay Wi-Fi to avoid interference, tooled around the TV interface for a few minutes before losing interest, and then considered the sheer normalcy of the situation after several hours of growing frustration and stress. It was like the outage had never happened.

This felt familiar.

In From the Editor’s Desk: Mid-2026 Health Check-In Update ⭐, I wrote about the quick resolution of two recent health issues that I thought were going to be long-time problems, things I would keep dealing with and, in one case, would require surgery. It’s weird when things you dread just work out. And there is definitely a life lesson to be learned in there somewhere, though I’m struggling to summon what that is.

Here’s what I do know.

When things go south, when something is wrong or not the way you want it, you feel it viscerally as a constant reminder of the terribleness and something that just weighs on you. This is true of everything, whether it’s the knee issue I stupidly endured for several months and then got fixed in less than a minute, or some tech issue like the enshittification we see in Windows 11 and all through our industry. But when a problem is fixed, it often leaves our mind immediately, and that’s true no matter how long the problem persisted previously.

For example, I struggled with that knee issue, worrying that I would be down for months longer still because of some surgery I obviously required. But when that was fixed, I very quickly shifted right back to normalcy. I could walk as I could before, quickly and with no indecisiveness. And I just immediately got used to that like there had never been a problem. I obsessed over it when it was bad and then just forgot all about it when it disappeared.

The Internet connection is like that. Not as serious, I guess, though I need that connection just to exist day-to-day for work but also for everything else. It’s a key part of what makes this Mexico thing we’re doing work at all in the first place. I missed it when it was gone, hated that it was gone, and in the moment, I saw the new connection for the miracle that it really is. But within hours, or maybe even minutes, things were just normal again. I’m not sure what this says about the human mind, or maybe just my mind. But it’s troubling.

I need to figure out the NAS, of course.

I had shut it down when we first arrived, and as I write this, I’ve still not booted it back up. I will do so at some point, but I also have worries that it will start trying to sync or whatever despite the work I had done to prevent that. It’s healthy to remember that I am, as always, the weak link in this chain. But I will need to figure that out. I’m still not sure how to handle this, but the most likely outcome is that I fly back to PA with it in mid-August so I can just set it all up again with the other NAS, hopefully correctly this time. And then, I don’t know.

That’s a decision for another day.