Praise the Backup

Well, that was a fun weekend. I have spent half of my time reinstalling MacOS Sequoia, and trying to get it back the way it was, while trying to avoid losing important files.

You see, on that chilly Saturday afternoon, I wanted to take care of my ageing computer, and tried an app that was supposed to clean the old files and “residue” from previously uninstalled apps. As a reader of this blog, you may know that I tend to use very few apps, but I try a lot of them. Trying a lot of apps means doing a lot of installs, and then a lot of uninstall processes.

So, while experimenting with yet another app, it crashed in the middle of its cleaning work. And, because I was being dumb, I thought it would be a good idea to empty the bin at that moment.

5, 10, 15, 20, 25… These were the thousands of files being deleted permanently from the bin. Even with lots of old app files, the number still seemed rather high. I stopped the process only after losing thousands of files and realised that this cleaning app had put in the bin a lot of files and folders that it shouldn't have. A lot of files and folders.

My blog files with all my Eleventy settings, all of it. Most of my system preference files. The app even deleted its own application files, which is why the app crashed, I believe. None of my other apps or extensions could be launched, error messages everywhere. I was having a lot of fun.

I restarted my computer, hoping the powerful reboot spirits would once again act miraculously, but my dear old MacBook Air welcomed me as it was a brand-new Mac, almost fresh installation. Even my keyboard was set to the wrong layout (which made it truly fantastic to enter a password in such a moment of panic), my wallpaper was gone, the dock was featuring all the default apps, and I was logged off my iCloud account.

Thankfully, this last part turned out to be a good thing because my personal and most important files, stored on iCloud Drive, were safe from whatever had happened on my machine. I also had a two-month-old backup on an external SSD, mirrored on JottaCloud.

The cherry on top was that I couldn’t use the “Put Back” right-click action on the files left in the bin as they were not put there by the Finder, but by this third-party app.1 There were 1200 files and folders left or so, most of them obscure preference files. Needless to say that I didn’t really bother taking hours of my weekend putting them back where they belonged, even if I knew how. I scavenged what I could, everything that seemed important — including a folder called “BBEdit Backups” (more on that later) — and used this opportunity to start anew.

Since my last backup was two months old, needless to say that I had a decent amount of work to do putting everything back together, including the last four posts of the website you're reading — which had been vaporised from my computer. I had to reinstall all my apps, my preferences, my keyboard shortcuts, everything that I could, while I could still recall what they were in detail.

I won’t blame the app that caused all of this, or my old computer, as much as I will blame myself. I should have been more careful about how to use it properly, I shouldn’t have decided to empty the bin at that moment, and I should have done better and more frequent backups: once every quarter is definitely not enough.

The clean MacOS install experience itself was not great: It was very slow, annoying, and during all this time I worried about not being able to connect to my site again or make Eleventy work the same way it did (sorry if I get a little PTSD).2

Today, as I write this, my computer doesn’t really feel any faster; a clean install can only do so much on the last generation of Intel MacBook Airs. MacOS was a pain, and I was reminded of my Windows user days more than I expected. For example, I kept getting a message along the lines of “The widget blahblahblah is a different version from a previous version of that widget, do you want to open it?” and clicking “No” just brought back the pop-up window three or four more times before it eventually went away. The prompt even interrupted me while I was trying to type my complicated Wi-Fi password. Not once, not twice, but thrice.

Now, everything seems fine. Eleventy works. Xmit works. BBEdit is just like it was. This whole experience made me realise three main things.

  1. That BBEdit is, indeed, just too good. I’m not sure if I could have brought everything back so quickly and confidently without this app. The BBEdit automated backup folder, the one I found in the bin, really saved me. Many of the most recent versions of the Jolly Teapot text files were still there, so I didn’t have to import the text from the live website. Just when I thought I couldn’t love this app more than I already did. I’m proud of myself for thinking of creating a backup of my BBEdit preferences too.
  2. That I seriously needed to create a better backup system so that in the event of something like this happening again, whether a human error or an app shitting the bed, I would only have a week or two of files to recover, and not a whole nine weeks of them. I just created an Automator workflow to help me automate my backups and include more files. I considered using Time Machine on my external SSD, or using an app like Hazel, but for my minimal needs, this Automator workflow should do just fine.
  3. That I may have actually enjoyed all of this: the crash and this weird situation gave me an excuse to both operate a clean installation on my Mac and justify the purchase of a new one. I will probably wait until March for the next generation of MacBooks Air, but the regular M5 MacBook Pro has never looked so good.

Apologies if you see anything weird on this site: some little layout issues and typos that were fixed in the last two months may have returned. Please let me know if you see anything suspicious (or any of the usual typos).

In the meantime, don’t be an idiot like me: take care of those backups.