We're living on a boat. We have 600W solar and that's sufficient for most of our power needs. Of course living off solar means on some days you'll not be doing GPU intensive stuff on the computer (which tends to turn it from a low-power, quiet machine into a hyperventilating 90W monster), but that's fine. We usually have enough power left to run the 12V watermaker.
Biggest problem is crap software. Everything seems to be designed to be online all the time and expect you to have unmetered high-speed internet. We often have various combinations of metered, slow and unreliable (packet loss, high latency spread, interruptions). Nobody even tests their software for this scenario anymore.
Obviously you can forget about using Xcode with its multi-GB updates every couple weeks. Or any cloud software. Even MacOS gets annoying, as it wants to verify an app before starting it and if the connection is flakey it can take a minute before that request either goes through or is detected as offline and your app finally starts (yes, I know you can turn that off).
Websites with dynamic forms often don't work, as the programmers falsely assumed their XHR always goes through and never implemented retries or network error handling. Download pages that generate dynamic URLs are a big sin too, so when you try to continue from a partially downloaded file you can't because your URL is no longer valid.
What works well is keeping data offline but occasionally syncing it, like IMAP for email, Unison file sync, etc.
Piracy is also important, because when you travel from country to country, geo-IP blocking is a constant problem. Suddenly the TV show you were in the middle of watching is no longer available in your country (because you sailed to another country) or the entire service is blocked (Amazon Prime Video). And it's safer to use cracked software that won't suddenly stop working because it couldn't contact its license server in a while or demands you to download a multi-GB update. Or software that doesn't require such nonsense.
Hardware is less of an issue, if you keep it dry, which requires some care, but so does the rest of boat life. I've had a keyboard die from circuit board traces corroding away, but am still on the same 8 year old laptop. Had one netbook get accidentally wet once, but managed to save it by immediate taking apart and rinsing out with alcohol. External drives are kept in waterproof plastic food containers.
Backup is offline only and consists of two external drives in another waterproof box, which go with the grab bag (the one you take with you if ever have to abandon ship). There is no real need for off-site backup, as the nature of life on a boat means either you and your grab bag make it off the boat, or neither (in which case you won't be needing your data anymore).
Biggest problem is crap software. Everything seems to be designed to be online all the time and expect you to have unmetered high-speed internet. We often have various combinations of metered, slow and unreliable (packet loss, high latency spread, interruptions). Nobody even tests their software for this scenario anymore.
Obviously you can forget about using Xcode with its multi-GB updates every couple weeks. Or any cloud software. Even MacOS gets annoying, as it wants to verify an app before starting it and if the connection is flakey it can take a minute before that request either goes through or is detected as offline and your app finally starts (yes, I know you can turn that off).
Websites with dynamic forms often don't work, as the programmers falsely assumed their XHR always goes through and never implemented retries or network error handling. Download pages that generate dynamic URLs are a big sin too, so when you try to continue from a partially downloaded file you can't because your URL is no longer valid.
What works well is keeping data offline but occasionally syncing it, like IMAP for email, Unison file sync, etc.
Piracy is also important, because when you travel from country to country, geo-IP blocking is a constant problem. Suddenly the TV show you were in the middle of watching is no longer available in your country (because you sailed to another country) or the entire service is blocked (Amazon Prime Video). And it's safer to use cracked software that won't suddenly stop working because it couldn't contact its license server in a while or demands you to download a multi-GB update. Or software that doesn't require such nonsense.
Hardware is less of an issue, if you keep it dry, which requires some care, but so does the rest of boat life. I've had a keyboard die from circuit board traces corroding away, but am still on the same 8 year old laptop. Had one netbook get accidentally wet once, but managed to save it by immediate taking apart and rinsing out with alcohol. External drives are kept in waterproof plastic food containers.
Backup is offline only and consists of two external drives in another waterproof box, which go with the grab bag (the one you take with you if ever have to abandon ship). There is no real need for off-site backup, as the nature of life on a boat means either you and your grab bag make it off the boat, or neither (in which case you won't be needing your data anymore).