My computer died a few days ago. Fortunately, I had a backup and could restore my data without problem on another laptop. Still, I’ve been wondering in the meantime: what if the restore hadn’t worked? How easily could I be locked out of my data ?
I have data online and data offline. My online data are mostly stored by google. If say, my account is compromised and due to a misbehavior from the hacker, my account is disabled. Would I ever be able to recover my online data? Not sure.
My data offline are stored on the harddrive, which I regularly backup with time machine. If a ransomware encrypts all my data, the backup shouldn’t be affected. Unless the ransomware encrypts slowly over months, without me noticing, and suddenly activates the lock out. Am I sure ransomeware don’t work like this? Not sure.
My laptop suffered a hardware failure. It hanged during booting, and no safe booting mode made it through. The “target disk” mode seemed still to work, though. It would have been a very bad luck, to not be able to access either the data on the harddisk or the backup. Both should fail simultaneously. But can we rule out this possibility? Not sure.
Harddisks and backup can be encrypted with passwords. I don’t make use of this option because I believe it could make things harder in case I have to recover the data. I could for instance have simply forgotten my password. Or some part could be corrupted. Without encryption I guess the bad segment can be skipped; with encryption I don’t know. Granted, these are speculative considerations. But are they completely irrational? Not sure.
Connecting my old backup to the new computer turned out to be more complicated than I thought. It involved two adapters: one for firewire to thunderbolt 2 adapter and one thunderbolt 2 to thunderbolt 4 adapter. Protocol and hardware evolve. With some more older technology, could it have turned out to be impossible to connect it to the new world? Not sure.
The probability of any of these scenario happening is small. It would be very bad luck and in some case would require multiple things to go wrong at once. But the impact would be very big—20 years of memory not lost, but inaccessible. There’s no need to be paranoid, but it’s worth reflecting on the risks and reduce the exposure.
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