My son's M1 Air CPU died suddenly. Maybe it was a thermal death from overheating. Not sure. But all the data on it was lost because the storage is soldered on. PSA to make sure devices with non-removable storage are backed up!
(We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.)
Sure, but in this case your cpu dies or ram dies or ssd dies, in all cases you loose data, in an upgradable system you loose data when ssd dies. Different risk factors.
SSDs are a more common failure point, as is theft or loss or damage.
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”
that's just a false sense of security. A machine should be treated as a whole. Separate components only matter economically, not for data security.
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
Hard drives failing is a far more common problem in my experience. As is theft and loss - one should always treat a laptop as if it will fail at any moment and keep good backups.
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 almost ANY failure means the laptop is basically bricked then even with good backups it means days or weeks before being back up to speed, having a working laptop with recovered data, esp. when working on highly confidential data as agreements can mean you cannot upload the data to a cloud.
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.
> PSA to make sure devices with non-removable storage are backed up!
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.
What would have been the right amount of harping about the environment though? Or is it always going to be a pointless exercise trying to convince/alert people?
Or is the only way to do that successfully, doing it subconsciously/covertly like the state actors are swaying public opinion? :-/
1. And yet we have someone on HN reminding everyone to even have a backup in the first place so let's not assume everyone on HN can't also make "average people mistakes".
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.
While I was expressing an ideal setup, it isn’t all or nothing. A single backup is still better than none at all.
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.
I agree, if it has too much friction it's more likely you will postpone it. Any option, either just a cloud backup tool or a spare HDD or SSD with CCC or TimeMachine is better than nothing. And you have to plan for the most likely case, e.g. spilling beer on the laptop vs the house burning down.
For the house burning scenario, a cheap strategy is having one or two old HDD's in USB cases, located somewhere away from your house, in a place you regularly visit and trust security-wise. Then you can just make a habit of dumping the files there whenever visiting. Most important data of mine is safe even if internet goes down and somebody nukes the city I live in, for zero recurring cost.
if you want to talk about 'average people' go hang out on reddit. How many times have 'average people' been brought up here explicitly to shut down a discussion. It is reductive and insulting
how many good things have 'average people' (and the avaricious wanterpreneurs chasing their dollars) ruined? Nearly everything!
Even if the storage is soldered on the data can still be saved if it's not the storage that died and even then, it could be possible to retireve at least part of the data. Get a data recovery specialist.
I guess I'm not tracking. I put all my source folders in my Documents folder on the Mac, and check the checkbox to have that sync to iCloud. It works quite well.
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.
In Windows, by default, Microsoft tools put projects in ~/source/repos, which OneDrive, in turn, by default won't touch so they'll be lost if the SSD fail and they're not in git.
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
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.
Surprising somehow, to me.
One would imagine Apple could make a good amount of money by selling storage and thoughts-off safety for normies?
And catch up to what Google offered like then years ago already with ChromeOS.
Yeah I've always thought it was weird, especially after they cancelled the Time Capsule, leaving no official Apple product to back up your Mac. I figured it was because the max iCloud plan was 2 TB and Apple sold Macs bigger than that, but then they increased the iCloud plans and still didn't do it...
That's a big ask. Probably only work the few hundred it'd take to do that, then get the data off it, if you had some super important documents // crypto wallet.
Is it really? In China you can upgrade your iPhone storage this way. Sure it's not for your average phone case store, but it's not exactly rocket science either.
Unfortunately not really a lot of places to do this in the US. And unlike shipping new devices from China to US, shipping used devices from US to China and back is prohibitively expensive.
The backup would live someplace other than on the broken machine. It would be encrypted some other way (or maybe not at all, depending on threat profile).
No point in encrypting those family photos burned to disc.
I am not familiar with Macs so I might have been wrong from the very start, but if the owner put the key in the secure enclave then the same user should have no problem at putting the same key in the secure enclave of another Mac. If the user can't write into the secure enclave, then the Mac is protecting the data against the very same user that is supposed to own those data. It is protecting against wrench attacks too but what's the most frequent scenario?
It's unrelated to the physical connection, but the drive encryption used on the built-in drive keeps its keys in the CPU's secure enclave, so dead CPU == data lost, regardless of whether the ssd itself is damaged.
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.
Very big LLMs can still be useful even when you run them only at the speed of around 1 token per second that can be reached with almost any mini-PC or laptop with the weights streamed from SSDs.
While at that speed they will not be your main LLM, there are tasks that are still useful even when requiring many hours, e.g. an overnight run, for instance for checking what has been produced after many interactive iterations of a fast but small model.
But then, some people specialize in taking photos that others would not because they have in mind stock photos, art or something else. They see the world differently.
The history of Chrome and Safari traces back to KTML, the renderer for Konqueror, a niche browser on Linux with so little market share there weren't real conversations about it ever seriously competing with Firefox or IE.
Then something unexpected happened: Apple adopted KHTML for Safari's WebKit. WebKit was then adopted as the render for Chrome
Could a niche browser still become mainstream /today/? I think so.
The complexity of web standards isn't necessarily a bad thing. A lot of the "complexity" (as usually judged by the raw size of the spec) is just existing APIs evolving to be more rigorously defined. Before that level of specificity, browser implementations varied and engineers had to make certain decisions.
A more "complex" spec can sometimes make the job of the engineer simpler.
That's not the kind of complexity that is the problem though. The complexity you have to deal with is just more and more features being shoved into the spec at breakneck speed, or if they are not in the spec, it's just Google adding them to their engine and everyone starts using them anyway to the quasi-monopoly of Chromium-based browsers.
Are they? I feel like the real difference is an insistence on actually enforcing them. There were some really strong standards at the time of IE5, it was just the wild west in terms of what got built. And then you had Tantek Çelik quietly building all of them in IE5 on the Mac. Just a question of where to look.
May just be me being a romantic. Work shut off access to non-Chrome browsers an took away Incognito Mode. Which is fun for QA work.
A distro should be secure-by-default. Omarchy’s design here was insecure by default while the docs have the impression that Docker might be running rootless. Pairing insecure defaults with docs that claim better security is bad.
(We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.)
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