there's 3 ways you 'could' send an SMS - this one's basically internally a cheap/surplus phone chip with a headless copy of android - in theory you could send it over adb, but this seems to have that ripped out.
there's ones that have their own 'driver' of some sort
and there's some that take standard modem commands apparently
@barlop I mean that literally... I run Samba, but only for one share, with very low security, so that my old-ass Windows install can grab games or files from my server. I download it from my newer computers and transfer it to where I need it.
email as a notification device is less reliable, as changing passwords means you'd have to remember to do so at the backup system as well... SMS is pretty robust in that sense
oh, I USB tether it or simultaneously charge while providing an access point, both eliminate battery use issues
it's more for mobile use, last time I was between places I didn't move over to the new one until internet access was confirmed to be working at the new place :)
@barlop You can tell Google to give you a ZIP export of all your data, including Google Drive and Gmail (I've never had to actually use it for anything, but I assume it has all your data). I then save this to an external hard drive, that I keep in a fire-proof safe under my bed. :)
It's worth mentioning that, by default, Google converts all Google Docs to their Microsoft equivalent format by default. The only other available format is PDF unfortunately.