Aug 30, 2023 Last updated Oct 27, 2024 2 min read Shorts

Backups Matter: The High-Stakes Game of Laptop Ownership

If you use a laptop as your primary daily driver and never make backups, read this.

Photo by Art Wall - Kittenprint / Unsplash

#HomeLab

Every single time I traveled with my laptop I was pissed off because of this.

Losing the laptop is a disaster. Game over. All would be lost because I keep everything there: documents, 10+ years of work, photos, accounts, passwords, etc.

It felt especially critical during my relocation adventures. If I lost my laptop at any point in my journey, the only thing I could do is to buy a ticket and fly back home.

Believe In Yourself! Losing a Laptop Is Possible!

It may seem that losing a laptop is hard. IRL it's not a biggie.

First of all, a laptop can break down hard. If it has an embedded SSD like MacBooks nowadays, good luck pulling the data out of a dead motherboard.

Secondly, neither HDD nor SSD are immortal. I think everyone has overcome the loss of an SSD at least once. Did you?

Last but not least. Surprisingly, there is a nasty real world outside of computer hardware.

Once upon a time, I lost my backpack with a laptop during a hard afterparty of an IT meet-up. Luckily, I found it in the morning.
Another time, I spilled a coffee mug right on my MacBook. It was fixed eventually, but for some reason, they love to wipe devices after spare part replacement at official Apple services.
Once, we were enjoying a tasty kind of craft beer when somebody stole my mate's backpack right in the bar.

Shit happens.

Even if you reside in a calm, nice, and safe country, there are always magical tourist places with pickpocket wizards.

In countries with lower safety levels, one can be robbed. During my calm life in my hometown, I think I've passed through 5 to 10 attempts of being robbed overall.

I Do Backups

TBH, the story above is not 100% true. It doesn't even trigger me to feel an anxiety attack kick in for a single reason: I do backups.

Previously, I had a very dumb but working way of doing it.

I had 2 HDD drives stitched with duct tape where I was storing my MacBook time machine backups. I was doing backups on one of them or another, so at any point in time, each piece of data had up to 3 copies.

Each hard drive had a passphrase-encrypted APFS filesystem so losing a drive wouldn't have caused any consequences.

It all worked perfectly until the external disks got filled with backups, my laptop got overwhelmed with photos and other media, and I got the necessity to back up several devices, store old device archives, etc.

I took a look at all this and started building a homelab server.