(We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.)
My macbook updates my documents etc to my NAS, and the NAS syncs to crucial folders to the cloud (not everything for cost reasons)
You should always assume your device can be stolen, you can spill fluids on it (or a guest), a cat can pee on it, an electric shock may kill it... No matter how great care you take of it, shit happens, data needs to be safe.
The SSD dying standalone vs the system dying doesn't change at all for data security. It's not a different risk factor
I wouldn't choose to buy a car I use every day that's 100x less reliable than a normal car.
If your looking for arguments against soldered storage the facts ssds are wear items and will eventually need replacement is a much better one.
If given a choice, I prefer a system where a HDD/RAM/GPU/CPU/PSU/Screen/Port/Battery/Keyboard failure is barely if at all disruptive to one where all of these effectively brick the system.
... single point of failure. /s
The point is it shouldn’t matter if the cpu or ssd dies because you have backed up everything already and are prepared for anything to fail or happen to the device rather then “oh the ssd is removable so in these select few situations I can recover my data”
Really this should be devices full stop. Also, "backed up" should include no fewer than two backups on different media and in different physical locations e.g. Time Machine to an external SSD _plus_ continuous cloud backup.
Your backup is worthless if you haven’t actually tested to confirm that it actually works. And you have to periodically, re-test, as well.
2/ This is like complaining that climate activists were harping too much 30 years ago, and that's why nobody listened
this is a serious issue though.
if you harp too much about something, it becomes background noise. people get desensitized.
if you harp about too many things, it fatigues people as well (ever heard of "alert fatigue"?).
so yeah, harping too much, too loudly about too many things is a serious and the society should really start looking into this
(edit: i am aware of the irony of harping about harping)
Or is the only way to do that successfully, doing it subconsciously/covertly like the state actors are swaying public opinion? :-/
No pain no gain also goes the other way, many times people don't learn until they get slapped in the face.
That'll be fun when half the world is migrating due to extreme climate events.
2. You mean the climate activists who used to risk their lives back in the 80s on open oceans instead of gluing themselves to streets? Yeah, the times have changed.
I suppose I didn’t specify exactly what I would recommend to someone who thinks it’s too hard, so here is that:
1. Install Backblaze. This is basically fire and forget. 2. (1) is enough for most people, but if interested (and on a Mac, which is what I’m familiar with), plug in an external SSD once a week or so for Time Machine. Setup involves clicking on the drive in the setup wizard and specifying an encryption password.
I don’t know about “ultra” robust, but this gives you protection from accidental deletions, natural disasters happening to your computer, hardware failures, and corruption from software bugs. The ongoing maintenance is plugging in a hard drive once a week.
If that is too much effort, just (1) provides natural disaster and hardware failure protection. It helps somewhat with the others but Backblaze only saves versions for 60 days and that’s a tight window to notice subtle corruption of e.g. your photos.
how many good things have 'average people' (and the avaricious wanterpreneurs chasing their dollars) ruined? Nearly everything!
If you’re not adequately backing up your data, then that is entirely on you. After thirty-plus years of this best practice guidance, there is no excuse for that kind of incompetence.
Apple makes this pretty easy with iCloud and Time Machine, but they are far from the only company trying to make this as easy as possible for their customers.
So, if the machine dies, you can’t just take the SSD and solder it onto another board somewhere. Even if you could, the SSD is part of the SOC that includes the CPU, and the Secure Enclave is part of the logic board that it was soldered onto.
Recovering data from an Apple device is intentionally hard to do. Apple wants to protect that device as much as possible from anyone who might try to steal your data by simply unsoldering chips and soldering them back on somewhere else.
If you use LUKS or BitLocker (w/o MS backup) you do not have this risk avenue (or recovery - it's your fault).
I'm assuming that all of my local work would be lost. But I'd still have the sixteen million duplicate photos.
iCloud's priorities are not a great fit for preserving my source code repos. Fortunately those aren't very big.
But when my son's Mac dies, his huge Logic Pro projects are toast. And he is a few thousand miles away now.
However, OneDrive doesn't seem to even know how to handle source files (it doesn't even attempt to honor the gitignore), so rebuilding a project in folders covered by OneDrive results in flurries of temporary files being uploaded/updated to the cloud, hogging the bandwidth, with a bonus of locking files, crashing builds, or even reverting changes silently.
One would think backup tools, even if primarily for normal users are still literally made by programmers, at least consider the use case of programmers instead of just ignoring them entirely.
file sync is backup against the things most people have to deal with (hardware breaking, theft, house fire, residential lightning strike)
I would say accidentally deleting a file is more common than a house fire, so NO, file-sync is not a backup nor is RAID (block-sync) or clustering (data/state-sync).
A backup is/should be a non-modifiable snapshot of data/files maybe even a state.
I give you an example:
You have a password-safe (as a file). Your computer blows up, but you are safe, because your password-safe is synced on Dropbox....but oh my god what was the password to Dropbox??? Your restore is gone because you forgot to "backup" your password-safe.
However you are not a Loser, being a Admin is a ~lost art and a really good paid one (again).... ;)
It goes to your trash can/recycle bin for a while. That's literally what it's for: to guard against accidental deletes. Very few people accidentally delete files from their computer's drive anymore. The only time people do this in 2026 is accidentally formatting an SD card that had their camera's pictures on it or something.
I also do a bunch of video work with Da Vinci Resolve, and those project files are in the same folder. I don't keep the clips there, those are on an external disc, but that's just because I haven't gone from the two terabyte iCloud plan to the six terabyte plan.
There is iCloud Drive sync, but that only syncs your Documents and Desktop folders, but any other files are not synced.
> We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.
Cool. How are you backing it up?
So, afterwards you effectively have a new iPhone with upgraded storage. Which you then have to restore somehow.
That is, unless you can find someone who can de-lid the SOC, remove the tiny RAM and/or SDD storage chips, and replace them with new ones. But then you’d have the same problem that the data was on the old chips, and encrypted. And so you can’t just copy that data over to the new chips, you have to decrypt all the data using the key stored on the Secure Enclave and copy it out in unencrypted format, then once the old chips are removed from the SOC and replaced, you then have to copy back all that data onto those new chips and have it re-encrypted from the Secure Enclave.
Anyone who can do that could just give you a new iPhone with more storage.
So, you can’t copy that key over to a different Secure Enclave. If you could, then it would no longer be a Secure Enclave.
How would you restore the backup if your secure hardware device is lost/stolen/damaged?
No point in encrypting those family photos burned to disc.
Obviously if you used the same encryption scheme on a removable drive you'd hit the same issue - but most people don't do that, because storing the encryption keys in the Secure Enclave makes your drive effectively no longer removable.