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Comment by dkonofalski | Hacker News Reader

With a MBP, you'd just restore from a Time Machine backup. If you don't have one, that would be on you.

Restoring from a backup is of course something I would have resorted to if it would have been necessary, but the point I tried to make was that it was not necessary because there was a much quicker way to get back up to speed.

Also not sure if the time machine backup would reinstall all the apps and settings exactly as they were before, but maybe it would, I honestly don't know the Apple ecosystem well enough for that.

All I know was that a friend of mine had a very similar issue recently with a Macbook (don't ask me which one) and she had the problem that not all data was on the time machine, some recent stuff was there, some not so recent stuff was missing and some even older stuff was there again. That's probably some user error but she was expecting everything to be backed up correctly so she did not even know that there was a problem.

It's definitely user error. We have a lease program through Apple and we get new machines every few months. Getting back up and running is simple and every new Mac computer asks if you want to transfer from an existing machine or a Time Machine backup. Transferring from machine to machine is a 1-cable or WiFi affair that takes less than an hour for most of our machines and any hardware issue is done from a Time Machine backup that takes a few hours at most. I don't see the advantage to being able to swap an SSD from one machine to the next since only the most technical users would even attempt that.

Is it appropriate to blame non-"technical users" for "user error" in such a case?

I think so. The default configuration for Time Machine is to back up everything. There's not really a way for a non-technical user to prevent it from backing up everything on the machine unless an admin changed the options in Time Machine to exclude specific folders/data.

That's some Apple-sanctioned gaslighting right there.

How is that gaslighting? I've done this multiple times when returning a lease to Apple and setting up a new machine. I was up and running in less than an hour.

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