I barely avoided a tech disaster. Apple could fix this. If they won't, don't do what I did
How my Monday was totally ruined, but then saved. Don't ruin your Mondays, folks.
It probably won’t surprise you, as you read this Substack named after an incredibly obscure line of dialogue from a very early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, to discover that I am a tech nerd. Always have been. And I make no apologies. I love technology. I’m a believer in technology. Technology has made my life better and simpler.
But bad design can fuck everything up and cause huge problems. That almost happened to me. Don't make my mistakes. And, to be blunt, don’t trust the tech companies. Even when they mean well, they can kill ya.
Spoiler: there is a happy ending to this story. But before I get to the details, and what I hope will be a cautionary lesson for you and hopefully a call to change for the tech companies, I do want to make a point of thanking both of the people at Apple technical support that I spoke to when dealing with this. They were completely professional and extremely understanding and sympathetic when some random furious Canadian called them up in near-tears. I was very, very upset, and they were very, very kind. I wanted to start with that.
OK, let’s get into this.
When I was in the university, I adopted the strategy of home computing I still use now. I always have a desktop, that acts basically as my command computer, and I always have a laptop of much lower capability that I use as my computer-on-the-go for work or light pleasure (playing music, for example). My laptop is always what I can take with me without any real fear of losing it. It would be a hassle, but not fatal. My desktop is where the important stuff is. I even used to name my computers accordingly: the desktops I named after famous naval bases, and the laptops after famous ships. The laptop went out into the world to do the dangerous stuff, and the base was were the critical stuff was kept secure. (I fell out of this habit years ago, but you can probably see where the idea came from.)
On my desktop, I keep vital stuff organized in a folder that I first created probably about 18 years ago: “Matt's Stuff.” Anything important that I generate on either the desktop or laptop, I simply drag into Matt Stuff. Matt's Stuff is further subdivided into other folders. It is a rudimentary but efficient organizing system that allows me to keep files of either sentimental or professional value safe and organized. I used folders inside folders because, first of all, it’s simple and it works, but also because I started this folder so long ago I was still using Windows then — I’ve been a Mac man since my early 20s, but probably created the first Matt’s Stuff on a Windows 98 machine. (Maybe an early XP, but I’m not sure.)
My music and main photo archives exist within Apple’s usual ecosystem, and are backed up virtually. But Matt’s Stuff is where I’ve shoved random files that don’t exist organically inside Apple’s automatically backed-up software systems. Old photos of deceased loved ones? They have a folder. Important business documents I get by email? They have a folder, too. Many of the most important files I have also backed up using Apple‘s iCloud, and I’d create a manual backup on a big external storage drive too. And strangely, this is actually where the problem began. Steps I took to protect myself and my critical and sentimental information actually ended up almost ruining the whole thing.
Until fairly recently I was using an old and increasingly cranky iMac computer. It had been obviously beginning to fail for some time, overworked by newer apps that didn’t exist when I bought it almost 10 years ago. I kept putting off replacing it because I didn’t want to spend the money (yes, honey, I really did delay as long as possible, OK?). A few months ago, it failed on me big time in a way that really inconvenienced me in the middle of a workday, and I said enough is enough. There's a whole hell of a lot happening out there — gestures at state of human civilization — and I don't need tech issues further sapping my time and patience. But money? You know what? I have enough money to not sweat a new computer when I finally need one. Fed up of battling to keep my old computer alive, I just ordered a shiny new iMac — and a more powerful one, this time, too, so it will hopefully remain useable longer. When the new one arrived, I spent a few hours on my old computer gathering every possible document to create a completely updated Matt’s Stuff, very carefully checking to make sure it had everything I needed. For the move, I renamed it “Matt’s Stuff (Master),” so that I wouldn’t get it confused with any older, less up-to-date version. (I hope the term “master” doesn’t get me cancelled.)
I’m usually pretty diligent about keeping Matt’s Stuff up-to-date, to be clear, but I wanted to make absolutely sure that it was so. Once it was, I created an ethernet local area network (LAN) to move Matt's Stuff (Master) off my old computer onto my laptop, which I was using as a temporary location for the information while I got my new computer set up. It was very important to me to make sure that Matt's Stuff was safe on the laptop, in case the old iMac failed entirely, as looked more and more likely. I also linked it to iCloud, so Matt's Stuff was safe there, too. It took me a few days, but once the new computer was set up to my liking, I moved all of Matt's Stuff (Master) off my laptop onto the new computer. To save storage space on the laptop, I then deleted Matt's Stuff (Master) off of it. Also, and this was a big mistake: I temporarily deleted my external copy of Matt’s Stuff (Master) so that I could use the full capacity of that storage to help migrate some other large files. This was a big mistake and entirely my fault.
But why should I have been worried? I had just meticulously moved all the updated folder contents onto the new computer, and it was backed up in the cloud. What could go wrong?
What went wrong is that Apple assumed it knew better than I did what I really wanted to do. When I deleted Matt's Stuff (Master) off of my laptop, which I was doing entirely to save space on the laptop, since those folders were linked to the cloud, it deleted them from the cloud, too. I wasn't asked if I wanted to do this, Apple just assumed that any file I didn't want on my small, overworked laptop I must obviously not want anywhere else. And sometime between last week and this morning, which is when I booted up my new iMac to get some work done, Apple, in its wisdom, decided that since I’d already deleted all these folders off of my laptop and the cloud, I guess I didn’t want them at all. And it had deleted them off my new iMac, too. I wasn't told this would happen. When I came down to begin my work day today, I noticed that Matt's Stuff (Master) was just gone. I had a terrible moment of shock — I felt like I’d been kicked right in the balls. iCloud? Gone? Laptop? Gone. New iMac? Gone. My external drive? I’d wiped it, thinking it would be temporary, just while I got everything moved around.
This. Is. Fucking. Insane. Sorry, but it is. The very steps I had taken to make sure this folder would remain secure actually resulted in its deletion, across multiple devices. Part of this was my fault, but I hadn’t counted on Apple going out of its way to kill my data. Hours on the phone with Apple’s tech support proved ineffective; since I had emptied my trash bins on all the computers after getting all the files migrated safely (or so I thought), my iCloud was purged, too, completely. Again, this isn’t an error — this is Apple deliberately doing what it assumed I wanted it to do. Once the documents were deleted in one location, Apple’s software helpfully went out and did a really good job deleting them everywhere. It was very efficient — too goddamned efficient! And the very nice and patient people there very apologetically explained that there wasn’t much they could do about it. Translation: there was nothing they could do except try to make me feel better.
What ended up saving me was a program called “Disk Drill." I spent about 100 bucks on it a few months ago when my older computer began to act up in various horrifying ways. I was able to use it to reconstruct Matt's Stuff out of a deleted folder that had not actually been fully purged yet, and I had to manually go through and find some files to add it back, so that I got it back to a full version of Matt’s Stuff (Master). I had to run it on both the old computer, which I hadn’t erased yet, thank God, and my external drive. But between the two of them, I was able to get my data back. All of it. I was amazed. It hadn't been my day up til that point.
Folks, there's a lot going on in the world. My tech problems aren't the biggest story today. But as we live more and more with these devices, completely ridiculous design decisions that cause problems they're supposed to avoid become more and more inexcusable. I’m pretty good with technology, I imagine better than the overwhelming majority of people out there. I’m a nerd, and no one picks up on this stuff like a hobbyist. Remember what I said above — I cheerfully set up a LAN to get my files moved. I mean “cheerfully” literally — I felt giddy getting my hands digitally dirty. Is that sophisticated? In IT terms, no. But could most of you do that without help? Do most people know what a LAN even is, let alone how to set one up and how and why to use it? I'm guessing no. I am a well above-average computer user (in terms of my tech literacy) and this Apple design decision still completely blindsided me. Everything that happened here was the default option and there were no warning prompts, ever, that deleting data locally deleted it everywhere.
This is 100% a flaw in how Apple has designed their system. I know what they are trying to do — they are trying to enable an efficient, seamless user experience across multiple devices. This makes sense, in an area when many of us have multiple computers (and yes, I'm counting that phone in your pocket as a computer — because that's what it is). I’m sure Apple's system works well 99% of the time. But in this one specific instance, it actually ended up converting a deliberate and cautious effort to protect data into an automated process that actively and relentlessly deleted it in three separate locations.
Hey, I’m just glad I got the data back. And you better believe in my newfound paranoia that this data has never been more cautiously backed up in many places. Matt's Stuff has never been more secure, ladies and gents. But many — most? — people would not have the money to spend on a disk utility, the technical skill to use it or, frankly, the free time and patience to do so. I got very lucky here, because I had a lot of advantages a lot of people won’t have.
And none of this was necessary. This would be an easily fixable thing for Apple and any other big tech company. A prompt making clear that a deletion request will delete it from the cloud and across all linked devices would have saved me a lot of stress and time. It would take Apple's coders maybe 45 seconds to write such a prompt.
And there’s no excuse not to. I was recently thinking about whether I should write a column about computer storage and how radically it has changed. I remember my first computer that had a full gigabyte of onboard hard drive storage. It was an astonishing development — the word “gigabyte” was spoken off with awe and reverence. It wasn’t all that long later (maybe eight years?) that I went to Future Shop — remember Future Shop? — and bought a mini-hard drive that was a whopping twenty gigabytes of portable memory for $100, and that one 1/50th of what the computer with a full gig of storage had cost. It was astonishing.
Jump forward to today, and the external hard drive that will soon be the new home of a backup of Matt’s Stuff has literally 100 times the storage, and cost about half the money, as my old mobile drive. It’s actually more dramatic than that, as I haven’t bothered adjusting for inflation — the point is clear even so. Data storage has been astonishingly cheap and is getting cheaper all the time. The explosive growth in affordable data storage should make the default assumption of every tech giant skew toward data preservation, not deletion. The kind of system design that almost ruined my Monday is especially unforgivable precisely because it’s so unnecessary with today’s technology. They can fix this, easily. It wouldn’t even take them long and the costs would be negligible.
I hope they do. But in the meantime, please share this widely and help others avoid this mistake.
A note to regular readers: I missed Friday’s note and update. Sorry about that. I should have mentioned the previous Friday that I was taking the long weekend off, starting on Thursday of last week, but I honestly just forgot. We’ll be back to a normal schedule this week. I hope your long weekends were wonderful.
mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney