Backup Power for Business: Every Starship Has It. Do You?

In Interstellar (2014), the Endurance spacecraft carries TARS and CASE — two AI robots with adjustable honesty and humour settings, programmed to sacrifice themselves for the mission if necessary. Every system on the Endurance is designed with redundancy in mind. Life support has backups. Navigation has backups. The crew’s survival is contingent on multiple independent systems being available when primary systems fail. 

This is a film about an existential mission to save humanity. The writers understood that nothing catastrophic could be allowed to depend on a single point of failure. 

Now consider the average South African SMB, which runs its entire operation through a single internet connection from a single ISP, stores all its data on a single server with a single backup drive sitting next to it, and has a disaster recovery plan that consists of hoping nothing goes wrong. 

The fictional starship was better prepared than most real businesses. 

Sci-Fi’s Engineering Logic Is Actually Sound 

Science fiction’s fixation on redundancy isn’t just dramatic device. It reflects real engineering principles that NASA, the military, and any serious infrastructure operator has applied for decades: single points of failure are unacceptable for mission-critical systems. 

The reasoning is simple. Any individual component — a server, a connection, a power supply — has a non-zero probability of failure. Over time, the probability of some failure approaches certainty. The only question is whether the failure takes the whole system down, or whether redundant components absorb it and keep things running. 

In Star Trek, starships have primary and secondary power grids, backup life support, and emergency protocols for every conceivable failure mode. In The Martian (2015), Mark Watney’s survival is a story of improvising redundancy — when one system fails, he finds another way. The engineering premise underlying both stories is the same: you build for failure because failure is inevitable. 

Your business connectivity and your data are mission-critical systems. Treating them as if they’ll never fail is not confidence — it’s exposure. 

The Two Redundancies Your Business Probably Doesn’t Have 

Redundant internet connectivity. Most SMBs run on a single fibre connection. When that connection fails — due to a line fault, an FNO outage, a subsea cable incident, or a contractor accidentally severing a cable — the business goes offline completely. A LTE failover solution adds a secondary connection on the mobile network, which runs on entirely different infrastructure. When the primary fails, it switches automatically. The crew never even notices. 

This is exactly the Endurance model: two independent systems, one active, one on standby, with automatic switchover when the primary degrades. It’s not expensive. It’s not complicated. And for a business where being offline means being unable to work, serve clients, or process transactions, it’s the most direct investment in resilience available. 

Redundant data backup. The 3-2-1 backup rule — three copies of data, on two media types, with one offsite — is the direct equivalent of the “never depend on a single copy” principle that any spacecraft designer would recognise immediately. Your live data is the mission. Your local backup is the secondary system. Your offsite cloud backup is the emergency protocol. 

When ransomware hits — and 94% of ransomware attacks now specifically target backup systems — the question is whether you have a copy the attack couldn’t reach. An immutable offsite backup, stored in a format that even an attacker with admin credentials can’t delete or encrypt, is your equivalent of the Endurance’s emergency beacon: it exists specifically for the scenario where everything else has gone wrong. 

TARS’s Honesty Setting: A Lesson in Transparency 

One of the most memorable details about TARS in Interstellar is his adjustable honesty setting. Cooper sets it at 90% — honest enough to be reliable, with just enough wiggle room for tact. 

There’s a version of this that applies to how IT providers talk to SMB owners about backup and recovery. A lot of businesses are told they’re “backed up” when what they actually have is a cloud sync that would fail catastrophically under ransomware, or a backup that hasn’t been tested for restoration in eighteen months. The honest conversation — the 90% TARS kind — is the one that says: your backup exists, but here’s what it doesn’t protect against, and here’s what a gap looks like. 

That honest conversation is uncomfortable. It’s also the only one worth having. 

The TARS Model for Business IT 

What made TARS worth writing about in Slate was not that he was powerful or intelligent. It was that he was transparent — he explained his decisions, he accepted human input that altered his behaviour at a fundamental level, and he operated with the mission’s success as his north star rather than his own continuity. 

Good managed IT works the same way. Not opaque, not just “we’ll sort it,” but: here’s what you have, here’s what you don’t, here’s what happens if X goes wrong, and here’s the plan. Redundant connectivity. Tested backup. Verified recovery time. No single points of failure. 

The Endurance didn’t leave for another galaxy without those things in place. Your business shouldn’t face Monday without them either. 

Dial a Nerd designs and implements resilient infrastructure for South African SMBs — LTE failover, Acronis backup, and disaster recovery planning that actually gets tested. If you want the TARS setup for your business, let’s talk.