Reason #27: Recovering Old Data
In 2013 - thieves broke into the house we lived in, and did a sweep of everything on the ground floor of our home. They stole car keys (which they used to get away with the car), cash out of multiple wallets (we had a pregnant friend and her husband staying with us), and a MacBook Pro. Though the MacBook Pro wasn't the most monetarily valuable of the items that was stolen, it did have over 40GB of images and videos from the prior 12 years.
Luckily, this information was all happily backed up on an external Time Machine drive. The only issue was, when it came time to replace the MacBook Pro, my dad got a Sony VAIO laptop instead. Apple, in their infinite wisdom, makes it impossible to access any data from a Time Machine drive on any OS outside of MacOS. If this was Windows, I'd say "Well, just install the OS then", except Apple doesn't let you do that either. You HAVE to buy a Mac device to access that data.
Over the years, that Time Machine drive ended up somewhere in my parents' loft, so when I got a Mac Studio last year, it never occurred to me to dig up the old drive and pull the photos off of it. That is - until over the weekend where Western Digital seemingly got hit by a ransomware attack. This attack has caused them to take all of their cloud services offline, and it was the thing that prompted me to find the old drive to pull all of the files off of it.
All-in-all, I got roughly 45GB of images/videos off of the drive. It's nothing short of a massive success, and they have already been copied onto an OS-agnostic NAS so we don't get locked out of those images again in the future. They're also backed up in my Google Photos, along with every other photo I've had access to. Roughly 400GB of photos overall.
Today was a 7/10
This post is part of a series called "The Reason". I haven't committed to living forever, but I find a reason to live for one more day every day. Read the rest of the series here.