Apple just cost me one week’s worth of work

Long story short:

Thanks to a stupid update pushed by Apple to my computer I was not able in any way, shape or form to access my laptop and save my work, yesterday evening.

The problem is that I have to do some client work tomorrow.

So I had to choose between deleting my work and re-installing the system, or waste tomorrow, trying to figure out how to save my work (an entire week’s worth of work). And then, probably waste the rest of the day reinstalling the system, anyway.

Being good at making choices, I thought that I already have the knowledge and can rebuild everything pretty fast.

But that knowledge doesn’t rid me of the frustration.

And there’s another side to this story. The client work was billed hourly and nobody will cover for that — hourly billing sucks and I hate it. At least not Apple or the client. So the time I have to put in to re-create everything is on my dime.

Anyway. This failure has taught me a lot.

First of all, it has taught me that I need a backup. An off-site backup. I always relied on GitHub to back up my code, because most of my work is code. I commit early and often but this time, due to some constraints, I wasn’t able to push my work to GitHub. And then this happened. Exactly on Christmas day.

This is why I decided to buy a cloud backup solution. Next step, will probably be to buy a NAS. For the cloud backup I was thinking of getting BackBlaze as I’ve heard it being mentioned on quite a few podcasts and shows I follow — looking for suggestions here, so tweet at me if you have one at @oprearocks

Good thing I didn’t sell my MacBook Air and instead gave it to my wife because I also uncovered that now there’s something wrong with my keyboard. Or with my motherboard.

The computer sometimes freezes and after some SMC resets I got it to boot. But now the letter “R” isn’t working anymore and I have to figure out why.

Bottom line, I think it is really stupid that on a mid 2015 MacBook Pro a simple OS update can mess up so bad. Especially when the laptop costs $2000+ and the company behind it is one of the best in the world. The funny thing is that I had an almost-fresh OS install. I reinstalled the system earlier, in November.

This is stupid, Apple! Very stupid!

Merry Christmas to you, too!

Photo credits: Tara Hunt — Broken Computer