Trick or Treat: Backup Edition

Yesterday I experienced the ugliest data scare in a long while. It had to do with my irresponsibility and new company policies.

The company I work for is expanding and we are getting to a point where implementing industry standard security policies is non-negotiable. About a month ago, our work MacBooks were barred from syncing files into and from iCloud. This makes total sense as a policy, but I was not prepared for the change - I have been using iCloud on the machine just like I would on a personal device. As a result, I have incurred a list of documents that have not been properly backed up and were simply sitting there locally, in the iCloud folder, that was never going to sync.

Prior to realizing that it is indeed the company policy that broke the sync, I started troubleshooting the iCloud sync through the Settings window on my machine. I thought, surely, “turn the thing off and then back on” is age old advice and seems to work in most cases. Should I have backed up all the files that were pending sync? Of course I should have. Did I do the thing that I know I should do? Absolutely not. I felt lazy. And what’s the worst that would happen? Will a silly button that turns the sync off delete all my files? … oh boy.

The moment I triggered the sync off, I was greeted with a long loading screen. Something felt off, immediately. It did ask if I want to keep my local data prior to showing the loading screen, and of course I said yes, but that did not make me feel any better when I opened the iCloud folder: I found it empty. Not a single legal file I had in it, not a single render of a song that I have been storing there - nada. If somebody were to take a picture of me at that very moment, I am certain that I got as pale as I could. This was mortifying. I was outraged. “I am an idiot - it’s all my fault”, I thought.

For the longest time, I have been using an Obsidian vault to store a lot of valuable information. I will not go into too much detail of what kind of data was stored in the vault, but there was enough to kill me if I lost the vault: it spanned almost a decade. And sure, I knew that the sync was only broken for about a month, so most of my legal stuff and renders are still in the cloud. That said, I use the vault daily and it is synced on that cloud, so I was almost certain that a whole month of daily note-taking just dropped through the floor. This was really where my fear came from. The whole of last month of extremely structured note-taking just out the window.

Long story short, the menu that asked me whether I want a local copy kept was not lying. I could not have known if the “local copy” implies the files that were not synced. It should, but who knows what the developers thought when they wrote the question, right? I found the folder in my home directory and went to work figuring out if I have my notes for the last month. I did. PHhHeEw!

I have never had a cheaper lesson in my life. Today, the day after that incident, I have set up a proper sync outside of iCloud, according to the company policy. I have finally set up a proper and regular back-up job for the vault itself and I made sure that all of my historic documents are still in the cloud. All of that at the cost of a scare. Sure, in the moment I thought that all is gone and I am doomed (insert exaggerating sfx here), but as it turns out I am still alive and so are my notes.

I never cared for a backup before that incident. “What’s the worst that could happen, right? I mean, it’s not like I never set up one for a company database, but it’s just my files, I will be fine if those got purged, plus it’s soooo much work to set up” - it’s really not, it took me some 10 minutes and I had a cronjob running with a dedicated data-store.

Don’t be lazy, set up a backup for that one thing. You know the thing, you just thought about it. Go on, it won’t take too long.