Two lessons: back up your shit, and prefer hardware with replaceable storage like M.2 slots.
I'm not sure how that would have accomplished anything (except a smaller repair bill, but that was footed by the warranty) in this story: either the logic board died and since the storage is encrypted at rest with the key stored in the Secure Enclave, the data is not recoverable; and if the storage is dead, well, the data is gone. Either way the data is as good as gone.
So either way, one lesson. Backup. Twice.
(Also, a brand new laptop has just as much chance of being stolen or suffering water damage or mistaken file erasure or a thousand other things that would destroy the data. Two months without backup is lunacy)
The drive encryption design is a holdover from iOS, and... a Macbook isn't a phone. People do very different thing with them (the linked article is by a video producer!) and need different solutions.
Encryption is done using a key. You are the owner of the machine, so you have the key. Just use that key to decrypt your files. Simple.
Bitlocker on W10 allows you to export the long key it to a file or printer. I've used this to swap SSDs from family members laptops with out much friction. This makes for simple upgrades or getting them going quickly after a failure. Perhaps Apple's implementation is different, but it doesn't need to be.
> (Also, a brand new laptop has just as much chance of being stolen or suffering water damage or mistaken file erasure or a thousand other things that would destroy the data. Two months without backup is lunacy)
For laptops used mostly at home, it's surprisingly difficult to kill the SSD inside them. Everyone's risk is different.
Devices are lost (failed, stolen, burned, destroyed) as a simple fact of life. Anyone who doesn't have an immediate recovery process with negligible loss simply isn't being a professional. His laptop could have easily been nicked from a coffee shop.
It's why most of us simply don't sweat this at all. I will never be in a situation where I'm desperate to recover what's on a device.
Remarkable that the comments are full of people speculating about failures and then, remarkably, getting angry and on a soap box about their speculation. Computing device failed. Amazing story at 11!
I will never be in a situation where I’m desperate to recover two months worth of data, but even losing a day is pretty inconvenient.
Key escrow has been a solved problem for decades, Apple just doesn't implement it (AFAIK, anyway).
And it's not like user-managed keys are that hard anyway. I mean, just install any modern Linux distro with a decent pass phrase and you can securely and safely move that SSD between almost any two laptops on the planet.
OS X does board-locked enclave-managed storage because iOS does board-locked enclave-managed storage, not because it's the right choice for the problem area. It's not a phone; the guy in the linked article lost 800G of video editting work!
If the T2 failed (it is now integrated right into the M1, so any failure of the mainboard), the data is gone. Everyone should know that by now.
So he went in with his scheme regardless of that. And his work had so little value that if his laptop were stolen, if a single rank of the storage failed, etc, he'd be in the same situation.
He lost data because he was careless in the same foolish way that we read about so often. But people get to beat their ridiculous anti-Apple drums, so here we are.
"OS X does board-locked enclave-managed storage because iOS does board-locked enclave-managed storage"
This is boorish noise. Apple does it because it provides strong storage encryption while imposing no performance or usability problems. You like something better - good for you. I don't. I have zero issues with this reality.
"I lost all my data!" stories are ridiculous nonsense 99% of the time, and this isn't in the 1%.
The linked article and this thread argues otherwise. But regardless, even if everyone understands "the deal" that doesn't constitute a reply to an argument that this is a bad deal.
In my experience, video editors are the least backed-up PC users.
Large videos are too much data to back up quickly and easily, the deadlines are always yesterday, they're always pushing the hardware's limits, the data is ephemeral so just not quite important enough to pay extra for redundancy, and they know just enough about computers to get themselves in trouble.
That disk can be moved around, you just need the passphrase to open it.
We've been doing this for decades now in linux land...
... again.
I suspect by far the majority of people who know this, learned this the hard way. I know I did.
(And even _after_ learning that, I once left a backpack with my laptop at an outdoor table at a cafe. It also have both the USB drive with my primary backup and the iPod with my secondary backup. I was extremely fortunate that a friendly waitress grabbed it and told management it was mine, and I only spent one sleepless night before collecting it after calling up the next morning... In my defence, this was back before "cloud backup" and high bandwidth internet to make that practical was a thing here. )
I hadn't really thought of this, but it's a concern for personal use. Not so much for data - I do backups - but because I tend to keep my laptops for ages (currently using an 8 year old MBA). Something to think about, certainly.
Heed this advice folks. Even the new Surface Laptop SSDs are replaceable.
It’s not a question of if it will fail, just when. If you want that data tomorrow, run an automatic, continuous backup solution.