*not really, but it's a nice title
I have been postponing setting up Time Machine for a while, even though I had already bought a 2TB external SSD specifically for this... For some reason, I thought that wasn't gonna be a good solution and was waiting to get a NAS set up at home.
Time went by and I just completely forgot about the NAS, and my SSD was just sitting idle at the back of a drawer. A few days ago, I was given a file with several security recommendations and general best practices for my daily life as an IT nerd, it was an initiative from one of the projects on which I'm involved since they wanted to make sure everyone working in it was as careful as possible with their digital assets.
I was already doing most of what they were suggesting, but two things really stand out for me:
- Using tools by Objective-See, which are Open Source versions of some of my go-to tools for securing my PCs.
- Setting up Time Machine backups.
As soon as I saw "Time Machine" in there, I immediately felt drawn to that forgotten 2TB SSD and got straight to setting it up. I configured a secure password for it (it's a SanDisk Extreme Pro, so it comes with hardware-level encryption), and then followed the very simple steps that my OS was showing me for setting up daily backups to this drive.
From now on, I simply have to connect the SSD once a day and let Time Machine do its thing.
Fast forward to 3 days after the initial set up and I found myself missing several files from my local aetherlay repo. Turns out that, while doing some cleanup, I decided to delete my local repo and clone it from GitHub to avoid pushing some changes that ended up being a bit trash (I messed my local git history). In doing so, I deleted several files that I had excluded from being tracked, files where I write stuff like pending features, guidelines to some AI agents that I sometimes use and such. Yes, for said feature list I should've been using a project-management tool, like Jira or even Notion, but I can't do that for the AI agent guidelines.
Time Machine to the rescue! In a couple of minutes, I had already recovered all my files thanks to an extremely convenient UI. No hassle of any kind at any time.
If you have some extra storage lying around, I urge you to put it to good use and set up Time Machine with it; your future self will thank you 🙏
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