“I lucked into some almost free solar panels. ... I hope my hard drives survive if this ever happens, got 6TB of data I’d hate to lose.”
Most hard drives, plugged in or not, would be toast. And if your solar panels have any integrated electronics they would be gone, too.
I read about a trick using an old microwave as a protective box for hard drives and small electronics. The post said an old microwave plugged into a grounded outlet can act as a shield for hard drives, acting as a faraday cage. I don’t know if it works, but you might look into it. You could get several external hard drives and rotate them between the computer and the microwave.
I guess the best thing to do would be to transfer the data to blank blu ray disks.
The solar panels are stored in a shed. They have no integrated electronics other than a 3amp diode to prevent the batteries draining when in the dark. I have a bag of diodes in protected storage that should be alright.
I have tube gear for just in case the solid state stuff is all fried. I can rig a vibrator power convertor for the solar system to power the filament and hi voltages for the old gear if the solid state inverters all fail.
I just spent about 12 hours over the weekend backing up my hard drive onto DVD’s - didn’t want to invest in a blu-ray burner. It was a royal pain in the neck, but ya never know.
If I had a generator and other emergency electronics to keep EMP safe, I'd build or buy a Faraday cage to store them in.
Underground storage is also effective.
An EMP strike against us would hurt and would quickly separate and potentially cull the heard of the weak and the unprepared initially, but we are resource rich and very resourceful.
Which reminds me, I need to go buy that Colt AR and get it off of my "wish list". I wonder if Walmart has any left.