Lessons learned when my SSD died

So there I was, happily typing away, when my screen turned black and was replaced with this confused-looking flashing icon:

To their credit, Apple Support quickly took my computer in, diagnosed the issue, and returned it back to me in just over a week — not bad. To their discredit, they haven’t figured out which parts of a computer you’re not supposed to make inseparable:

The boot issue was confirmed to be caused by a hardware fault with the machine’s Solid State Drive which will require replacement of the Logic Board to address the issue.

While it was going through the process, I wasn’t too worried, because I knew I had a backup. And here’s what went right: I still have all my files, I’m still in control of all my internet accounts, and I didn’t tear my hair out during the recovery process. I back up all my files to a remote server, and while the (long, auto-generated) server password lives on my machine, I had a paper copy hidden in my house that finally proved useful.

So what went wrong? #

Something’s got to go wrong, right? When you read data recovery stories, they go in one of two directions: either everything goes smoothly without a hitch, or there’s no backup or it’s corrupted or something and everything you’ve ever worked on is lost. When I saw the flashing icon, I expected one of these two things to happen. Either my backup procedure worked, or I’d have to start from scratch.

Instead, it… kind of worked? Here’s a list of everything that went wrong:

• Because I was only backing up certain folders, I lost a lot of ‘transient’ files, like in ~/Desktop or ~/Downloads. Most of that stuff probably isn’t important, but I’d still like to know what it was.

• Also missing from the backup were all my SSH keys. Whoops!

• While restoring, I messed up one of the options, and all my 755-permissioned executable files became non-executable 644.

• Despite only backing up certain folders, I wasn’t ignoring compiler output and node_modules folders, making the recovery process take three times as long as it downloaded hundreds of tiny files.

• It happened while I was at work, and I didn’t have the adapter needed to plug my USB flash drive into this USB-C-only computer.

• I panicked and disabled 2-Factor Authentication for all the accounts I happened to have open on my work machine at the time.

So, not great, but not a disaster either. Even though it could have gone a lot worse, the overall problem was that I only thought about the upload, rather than the download.

I thought that just because my backup script ran without error each time, I’d be fine in an emergency. I never considered that running it once a day was only half the battle!

Of course, it’ll happen again #

Life is nothing without learning. What should I do for next time?

• I’m just going to find the ten or so largest space sinks (~/Library/Caches, node_modules), ignore them, and back up all the rest. It’s just not worth being economical about this!

• The script now runs exa ~/Desktop ~/Downloads --long --tree and backs up the result so I at least know what’s in those folders.

• I got one of those cheap Android phones. It’s got my e-mail password and is signed in to all of my accounts, and is locked in my drawer so even if I lose everything else I still have that one.

• USB-C-to-A converter now lives in my bag.

I don’t think I’ll be able to test the entire process until I’m forced to, the next time a hard drive gives up the ghost. But making all these mistakes means I’ll hopefully remember them then.∎