How would one go about protecting their own personal backups from something like this?
Would a hard-drive be fine if it is just not plugged in at the time? Or would it need to be stored in some sort of faraday cage?
Would a hard-drive be fine if it is just not plugged in at the time? Or would it need to be stored in some sort of faraday cage?
Of course we have a lot more long wires now so the problems would be correspondingly larger.
I suspect that more damage would be caused by secondary effects than the direct effect of the induced currents. Some power lines would trip out and this would add extra load to other circuits which would trip out even if not affected by the direct effects of coronal mass ejection. In a poorly designed or poorly maintained power distribution system this will cause a cascade of failure that can disable power supplies and communications over a huge area. This sort of cascading failure happened in the US North East in 2003, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003.
See https://www.wired.com/2011/09/0902magnetic-storm-disrupts-te... for some first hand comments.
This is not a problem for your cell phone. Your hard drive, even if it is legacy spinning metal in a live laptop disconnected from your wall power will not notice any more than it will notice you setting your credit card down on the palm rest, from some basic order of magnitude on the change in dB/dt.
Your faraday or powered down devices also won't prevent them getting destroyed in a neighbourhood going up in fire either.