What happens if the T2 Chip fails? Is it possible to recover data on the disk? Or do we have to recover data from the last backup?
Apple installed a port on the motherboard that their techs can use to recover data if the motherboard fails. But sure enough it didn't work with my 11 month old Macbook Pro.
Moral of the story... even if Apple has a mechanism for hardware failures, there's a chance it won't work.
All my "valuable" stuff is on github, or google drive, or icloud photos or something-or-other. My local drive is really just a local "cache" for speed purposes.
I don't see how else you're expected to not lose sleep at night anymore.
Apple replaced everything except the bottom case. I picked up the laptop with 100% charge, tested it was working. I jumped on a flight home (no apple store in my country) and that night kaboom, Macbook died again! What are the odds? I hadn't plugged it in to anything. The eventually agreed to give me a brand new one.
The positive side of this experience was forcing me to use an iMac and only work from home office during specific hourse and to not be attached at the hip to my laptop. Net positive for my wife and I.
Shit like this is why I will never buy another Apple product. With my encrypted drives I can pull them out, put them in another machine and decrypt them no issues.
Shit like this is why I only buy Apple products.
The data I care about I have (encrypted) backups of. Not having backups and hoping that a specific hardware failure will not affect my ability to restore is equivalent to, well, just not having backups to begin with.
Yes, because clearly all other encryption technologies are so vulnerable to theives and cops. There's only a pile of evidence of TrueCrypt and Bitlocker being quite effective in the field against both criminals and law enforcement agents.
And that's not to mention SSD-based technologies which still allow for portability while mitigating some of the more theoretical attacks.
> The data I care about I have (encrypted) backups of. Not having backups and hoping that a specific hardware failure will not affect my ability to restore is equivalent to, well, just not having backups to begin with.
This is a good strategy, I too employ it with the majority of my important data, but it's just not realistic for normal people. And I'm sure I'm forgetting some scratch note or IDA database file that I'd be missing if I lost my desktop drive today...
I did some support for some encryption devices a long time ago.
If someone was having that difficult conversation (you could just tell it was about to happen) we would all silently gather around to hear how it went...