I’ve almost completely recovered from the debacle with my old computer. At least recovered enough to resume posting to Irreal. I now have a brand new 13“ MacBook Pro complete with touch strip and bad keyboard. My old machine was 6 or 7 years old and I’d been thinking of replacing it but I was waiting for Apple to admit they made a mistake with the new keyboards and go back to the old style across their product line.
The 16” does have the new keyboard and wasn’t that much more expensive but I really like the 13“ form factor. And there’s no getting away from the touch strip so I’m just sucking that up.
I learned a lot from all this. First and most important, a robust backup regime is vital. I use Backblaze, which I really like. It’s not too expensive and takes care of backing up everything automatically. I was hoping to never have to use the restore function but my old machine was completely dead so I couldn’t migrate my environment to the new machine automatically. The Backblaze restore has several options but the easiest and fastest for me was to download a zip file. Backblaze even provides a downloader that they say is faster and safer than using the browser and it did work well. At one point there was a network problem but the downloader was able to restart where it left off.
I made the mistake of unpacking the zip file from my desktop. That was a mistake because the desktop is shadowed on the iCloud and it filled up my iCloud space as it started to expand the zip file. I aborted that and moved the zip file another area that wasn’t shadowed. After that, everything went pretty well except that some permissions and ownerships were changed and I had to fix those. Fortunately the -R option to chown made that mostly painless.
So the second lesson is that it pays to have a local backup of your important files. I’ll probably get a solid state hard drive (like this one) and maybe tie it to Apple’s Time Machine mechanism. If I’d done that before it would have been easier and faster to recover my environment.
Perhaps the most important thing I learned was that my smug assurances that I could recover in a day if Apple suddenly disappeared were wildly overoptimistic. Starting with a new machine and no old machine to help migrate your important files turns out to be harder and more finicky than I supposed. Still, my main point holds: All my data is text and I could just as easily restored it onto, say, a Linux machine if I’d needed to. It just wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.
This is a long post but the TL;DR is that if, like me, you’re living a digital life and have important data on your computer it’s vital that you keep it backed up.