Given his use case which involves massive video and photo editing, and the reports of excessive writes on the SSD in the M1s is it possible his SSD just reached EOL?
I don’t know what the symptoms of an SSD reaching EOL are, would it just stop responding at all?
I don’t think we still have heard anything from Apple about the massive SSD writes and that for me is the biggest concern before making an M1 based purchase.
I’d be incredibly surprised if that was the case, even cheap budget SSDs have 500+ TBW ratings.
I’m amazed this person had 800GB of important data on a laptop and yet zero backups. Especially when a backup service like backblaze is $5 a month and you just set it up in 2 minutes and it runs on its own.
If there was 800GB of static data, it was almost full, so the wear-leveling process wouldn’t be optimal and it would write over a small part of the flash cells over and over. In that case you could exceed the program-erase lifetime, but not necessarily the TBW. We know the total TBW was high, though, so it was even more excessive.
From what I’ve read, Apple has fixed this problem in a recent Mac OS version. Apparently, it was a swapping bug.
Posters had narrowed down the excessive writes down by limiting memory usage, so they knew it was a swap problem, and some users said the latest OS fixed it. Now that I’ve checked it again, they’re saying it’s better but not fixed.
Its the difference between static and dynamic wear leveling. Static wear leveling will shuffle around the data in static blocks to even out the program-erase cycles.
Maybe it did. But it was the boot drive and soldered to the motherboard. So the OS would need to write to it and there’s no way to get the data off in a third-party manner. That’s kind of the big issue.
And there you have it. What have I been telling the M1 hype squad over the past few months over first-gen products from Apple? [1] [2] [3] [4]
Not even Apple support knows the cause of this issue. You are better off skipping it altogether and waiting for the M2 or higher. Losing a $1000 laptop due to heavy work is already one unacceptable thing, but replacing the whole unit and losing your work in order to 'fix it' is another unacceptable 'solution'.
Always have a backup handy. I doubt the regular folk buying this machine would be bothered to do this anyway so the risk of this event runs higher for them. Especially when the SSD is baked into the motherboard.
Or maybe that they now realise that they know I am insufferably right (and hate me for it) and are now coming to terms to what they have just purchased.
Well I guess we'll have to see if the fanatics and the hype squad have learned their lesson into jumping into immature first-gen Apple products.
So now I was censored because I was right, thus I will repeat my previous messsage:
Or maybe that they now realise that they know I am insufferably right (and hate me for it) and are now coming to terms to what they have just purchased.
Well I guess we'll have to see if the fanatics and the hype squad have learned their lesson into jumping into immature first-gen Apple products.
It wouldn't surprise me if some of the "hype squad" (as you put it) were part of the marketing campaign at product launch. Rave reviews about a new product that are based on benchmarks alone rarely make sense to me.
Certainly. The lesson I took from this was that the risk of data loss is much higher on the MacBooks these days because the it's not simply the chance of the SSD failing that could cause data loss but also a failure of any of the motherboard components as well. It's something I hadn't considered and something definitely worth keeping in mind.
This is an old story, and it's pretty clear that SSD EOL is the actual problem.
That's a problem, for everyone using SSD, and for Apple, for not managing write, monitoring it, warning about it, ec., but this not a problem unique to the M1.
Thermal management isn't rocket silence. People don't report their (passive) iPads die from heat, even though in sure some have been subjected to extreme workstation workloads.
For anyone reading this..... macOS has Time Machine.... you just plug in an external usb disk as big as you can afford, tell time machine to use it, and it backs up your stuff in the background. There’s no excuse for losing data cause your primary disk crashes.
time machine uses snapshots, which might take your disk space away if you do not know it.
just for anybody wondering why they do not have any disk space left of their 1tb drive, besides only using like 400g
The disk space used for snapshots is automatically re-claimed by the OS when it's needed by the user. The trade off is near-instant backup images.
And while MacOS sometimes has issues expediently clearing space the was previously used for snapshots, tools like DaisyDisk and others can force its hand if you need.
Bottom line, you don't lose available disk space by using Time Machine.
That’s the theory, and it works like that on my MBP. But for some reason on my old iMac, snapshots used to just accumulate and every so often things start crashing because there was no space left, causing all sorts of issues. Sometimes the OS couldn’t boot because of that, it really was a pain.
And yes, you can nuke snapshots preemptively, but often the first visible sign was Mail having corruption issues because it’s database was borked, at which point it was too late.
Time Machine can't run on my Mac because there's not enough space on disk for it to run. Third party backup services that can function with the comically small default SSDs are preferable.
No backup scheme can keep storing data once the disks are full… TimeMachine is fine to restore a computer to its state a day or a week ago (say, before an OS update or to transfer data to a new device), and to get some documents up to a couple of months back if the backup drive has the recommended size. It’s not a professional tool designed to restore a whole computer to the state in which it was 2 years ago.
But yes, you need to check that it can restore every now and then.
It’s not the same use case. When your computer kicks the bucket and you need to transfer your data to a new one you don’t care about documents from 5 years ago. If your backup does not have your state from yesterday you’re screwed.
Time Machine is not a long term backup, it’s a safety net.
Even better, use Time Machine to a NAS! You can have redundant drives, in case one dies!
Migrating Time Machine backups from a USB drive to a network share is not supported, but it's doable, not impossible. (This is something I've done before, and in fact I'm doing this for family right now.)
The problem here was that Apple is the only one who knows what's wrong with this new laptop and they don't have time to try to recover the data. Had the rights-to-repair law passed, the author would have had the option to try with a third party that could have saved his work (or to see whether it is an option). For many, $1000 for not losing two weeks of work is a small price to pay compared to redoing all the work.
The issue with having only first-party repair is that you have no choice other than to lose data.
This is one of the reasons the cloud storage services became so popular. Properly backing up data, with multiple backups, not all piled in the flood prone corner of a closet, is not fun.
> is that you have no choice other than to lose data.
Right-to-repair is great and all, but trusting the storage on a laptop is crazy. I've had basically the same thing happen with Dells, etc.
Forget just laptops, though they are more failure prone. Trusting the storage on any single machine for critical work data for any longer than necessary is unprofessional.
It's not about trusting the storage, it's that failures in components not storage end up junking the storage in the repair. In all likelihood this board suffered some other sort of component failure (because if it was the flash, something would still boot and display). That 1TB flash device was perfectly good, and with only an ever so slightly compromised design could have been dropped right into a new board and the user would have left happy with "their laptop" still intact.
But now the poor guy needs to recover a huge partition from partial backups, and that sucks. And it was totally avoidable..
(FWIW: I don't understand your point about not trusting storage on laptops. Modern SSDs are extremely reliable. Sure they can fail, and you should always have a plan for what happens if they do. But in practice you should absolutely trust your laptop storage.)
> But in practice you should absolutely trust your laptop storage
As a consumer this is perhaps practical advice.
> Trusting the storage on any single machine for critical work data for any longer than necessary is unprofessional.
But if you were a customer, would you be okay with a business losing your vital data because they wanted everything on a single machine? It doesn't matter if it's a laptop, it may be a server on the cloud.
I’m a consumer and a professional. Consumer me cares more about not losing my local data a lot more than professional me does. (Professional me has a lot of other copies even if not perfect backups, I could do a good-enough restore. Consumer me can’t get back a picture of my kids when they were young if I didn’t have backups.)
They start heavily corrupting data if left unpowered for around a year or two though, in case this gives anyone false confidence in a use case they aren't designed for.
Just plugging them in often isn't enough to make them notice and refresh all data - the SSD doesn't have a clock in so doesn't know it's been unplugged for a long time.
The real answer is "for every month an SSD is powered down, leave it powered up for a day"
The original poster stated, "They start heavily corrupting data if left unpowered for around a year or two though, in case this gives anyone false confidence in a use case they aren't designed for." A person asked if all SSDs do that and you said, "Yes, all SSD's suffer this effect." This statement is wrong.
The AnandTech article even mentions the falsehoods and states it wants to clear up the confusion. A drive must meet certain conditions before data loss begins. Simply putting a backup or thumb drive in a safe for several years isn't going to cause data loss and the AnandTech article comes to this conclusion.
Here is another article from PCWorld with commentary from the authors of the 2015 JEDEC presentation that started this hysteria.
That's 2015, densities have gotten much higher since then. I'll take back heavily corrupting, I've seen it happen but I don't know that it is the norm within 1-2 years.
Its nonsense. For both SSD and HDD.
Although HDD do have a tendency to fail shorty after reuse if they where not used for years. This is due to lubrication decomposing afaik.
No they don't. This myth originated when Alvin Cox (Seagate) gave a JEDEC presentation in 2015 talking about cell corruption when the drive reaches its end of life AND is stored at abnormal temperatures. Simply leaving flash unpowered won't corrupt data, especially consumer drives. This has been debunked by Alvin Cox and all the manufacturers of flash storage.
> and you should always have a plan for what happens if they do.
This is what I meant. Not that you expect your laptop to fail (or be stolen), but any important work should exist in a recoverable way. OP claims to have lost a lot of data when this happened to them. That should approximately never happen, at least not more than the day's worth when you were off network.
Really sad to see that almost all comments here immediately turn to "victim blaming" and mention that this is a story about the need for backups, and not the story of hardware manufacturers removing the rights of consumers.
And while the RTR laws would have helped here, let's remember there's only one thing we can do in the meantime to put pressure on these companies: don't buy hostile hardware in the first place.
Nobody's perfect. I use an iPhone and I just bought a watch from them. But I think it's equally true that you should be able to keep two thoughts in your head at once: even when buying Apple hardware because you're more or less forced to (or really want to), keep talking about how this is unacceptable and lobby every lawmaker you can. It's not cool.
What does it mean the SSD is soldered to the motherboard? If I was to loose 2 months of work I would rip the disks off with my teeth. What is the real issue here?
It's of course technically doable - the laptop itself is a device that talks to the drive via T2. But it's not something Apple wants to do. This was an issue for years already before M1 was introduced.
You have to backup more regularly than every two months...
And Apple replaces the entire motherboard if a component on it fails. The agreement that you may lose data has been around awhile and it's just boilerplate. When mucking around on a board they aren't going to guarantee anything - and I don't know if third party repair shops would do that either. There is always the chance someone screws up and breaks something.
When Chia mining really ramps up, it will kill off SSDs faster than a T-rex in a petting zoo.
I think the horror stories are going to just explode.
If Apple has any weakness here (and this might be the butterfly keyboard all over again), then their products are going to get absolutely trashed in the media.[0]
[0] - I use apple products pretty much everywhere, so I'm not looking forward to this, just presuming it will highlight any SSD weakness they might actually have.
> When Chia mining really ramps up, it will kill off SSDs faster than a T-rex in a petting zoo.
It's possible, but the "farmer" would have to be very serious about Chia and also not have read any FAQs, not watched any videos, not visited any forums, etc. A healthy fear of plotting on one's boot drive is the first thing drilled into Chia-heads' heads.
How technically feasible would it be for Apple to design emergency drive access into the hardware? Even though the flash is soldered on, you could still picture some kind of connector that allows a special device to operate that part of the board independently of the other stuff on the board.
The special device could even be another laptop of the same model that supplies power. Disassemble both, connect a cable, and essentially "move" the drive to a different computer even though it's physically still unmoved.
They used to have this. It was the Life boat connector. You would connect a magic black box to another mac and the connector to the logic boards life boat connector and you were able to migrate the customer data from the dead board. HOWEVER since they started encrypting the userdata at a hardware level they removed that port (because unless you went via the T2 chip the data you extracted from the drive would just be random data).
EDIT: Could they in theory add a port to machines going forward that as long as the T2 chip (or what ever they use today, i think they incorperated it into the M1 chip itself) was still functional (as it holds the keys). Sure, why not? But they would have create a way to unlock the T2 (or what ever chip) but apple could create a way either by having a master key or devise keys based on serial numbers, etc etc etc. The Mac they use to recover data via the life boat connector could phone home to Apple and with the right auth be granted an auth to unlock the chip and allow data retrival.
If I were to give apple the benefit of doubt, they might not want to as they don't want a way to be compelled to decrypt customers data on their hardware (Be it a 3 letter agency or a rouge employee).
What about a port for unlocking the storage via T2 with the user’s password as normal, just bypassing everything else on the mobo so that data would still be recoverable if the dead component was something other than the T2 or storage?
My understanding is that the T2 chip and storage works like how the iPhone does. Everything on flash is encrypted but you have system data and user data. The keys to system data are unlocked during the boot process (the T2 also replaces the SMC so it also handles the POST). User data is encrypted with different keys (which are probably locked with the users password). This way the machine can boot without a password (like how on a iPhone you don’t enter your passcode until the phone has finished booting).
If you were to replicate that hand shake between the OS and chip, sure apple could have created a “lifeboat connector” on T2 based macs. However the “isolated island” of the PCB communicates with would get more complex (you don’t want to be back powering the whole board from the connector, if there was a simple short on the board somewhere which was preventing the machine from powering on, then with no isolation you could be also “powering that short” from the lifeboat connector and be unable to recover data without more work.
On M1 MacBooks things have been stepped up a notch. The Application processor and the security processor that handles the encryption are now the same chip, so you would have to power a “whole lot more”. To top it off the flash chip which is to your SSD and the RAM chip are on the same package as the M1 unit as one big System On Chip.
Think of it like this, it’s like if a Intel I7 processor also had the ram and SSD on that chip you brought when you built your machine.
Now it’s a lot more harder to create a lifeboat connector. Not impossible but harder.
Now as Apple will have a lot of data on their own repair program they can look into how often they were able to / could be bothered to recover data off their older models and how much it pissed the customer off and probably decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.
If I were giving them the benefit of the doubt. They think their customers data will be more secure without it.
But it’s another reason why right to repair is important. As we have seen with phones, people are willing to write off the phone and pay decent cash to recover the pictures of their kids they had on their phones. With schematics, 3rd parties could much easier create tools and fixes to get the SOC in a workable state just long enough to recover data (Apple R&D prob even have have test boards where they can swap the SOC, If the SOC, Ram, Flash are all ok and not had LCD backlight voltage sent down the data lines... And recover the data. But their "repair techs" have to now learn how to remove the SOC package from the main board).
If the chip that contains the keys itself is dead, even with all documentation and access to parts you wanted, you are SOL as these chips are typically designed to create the keys on chip and never let them out.
Given everything is encrypted at rest and requires the M1 and with Secure Enclave to decrypt… probably pretty hard. If you can't boot, you also probably can't decrypt the drive.
Apple purposely removed it a couple generations ago. If you're m1 machine dies you can't recover your data (Apple might be able to but probably won't). If the SSD dies, your laptop is a brick and can't even boot from external media.
>3. I wasn’t the ONLY ONE who encountered this.
You should check out the posts in MacRumors and this long thread in Reddit.
This issue is quite well known for those who followed the Apple M1 rollout closely. My suspicious is that
1. It is the same USB / Thunderbolt Charging issue again as with previous Intel Mac. Where basically the USB-C somehow fried the CPU. ( Louis Rossmann has tons of video on it )
2. The CPU / System is simply not designed for these type of usage. Especially with zero cooling. ( Sometimes, I would even leave the machine switched on for overnight rendering )
And it could also be other component that overheat.
Apple needs to sell an official Time Capsule and Make Encrypted Backup to iCloud as option for Offline Backup.
You have to understand the Apple fanboy mindset. If it breaks, it's your fault. Soldered SSD? Do backups you dummy! Over heating? Just use it for email and browsing. Dead pixels? Get better glasses. No ESC key? Buy an external keyboard. Keys not working? Don't push them so hard, they're butterflies!
I really dont think they did. It should be MacBook Pro with proper cooling. And personally I dont think overnight rendering, that is 100% CPU usage for 8+ hours should even be done on a laptop with no cooling fans.
The $2400 price tag was because of Apple's ridiculous memory and Storage upgrade cost.
> The CPU / System is simply not designed for these type of usage. Especially with zero cooling.
While I agree that consumer hardware in general and laptops in particular aren't designed for this usage, internal overheating should never be the cause for catastrophic failure.
A system should be designed to throttle down or shut down before risking permanent damage. Should this be a heat related problem, I'd consider it a design flaw.
Degraded performance is acceptable, permanent damage to non-replaceable internal hardware isn't.
> Apple needs to sell an official Time Capsule and Make Encrypted Backup to iCloud as option for Offline Backup.
Not going to happen. Since they disbanded the router team 3 years ago, there's zero chance of a Time Capsule product coming back anytime soon.
They want customers to use iCloud and I think that's the better option for most users. People like the person in this blog are professionals and should use professional backup solutions (whether offline or online).
Did anyone see the linked article at the end which described very large writes to the SSD in short time frames? I think Marcan had joined in on the twitter conversation. Lots of terabytes in just a fee months. Any ideas why this might be?
I saw him mention it at the end of this article, but the way the link was presented caused me to lose any interest in clicking it. Is it a story worth reading?
The style was obnoxious I agree. If you're interested in buying an M1 MacBook — I wouldn't buy without being aware of the need to watch SSD writes. It seems like M1 devices with low memory have scenarios that they will use their SSDs crazy hard.
Well we did warn them enough times to avoid first-gen Apple products and 'going all in' on the risk and now they are the ones crying on the bench having lost their work because 'it died' for no reason.
It never hurts to wait for Apple to fix these issues. By then the software for Apple Silicon will be optimised on a faster chip. (M2 and higher)
Yes very much this. A soldered SSD is absolutely putting a real limit to the lifespan of your pc. Not to mention making it unreasonably expensive to try to recover data in event of system board failure.
Data recovery is impossible [IN THIS SITUATION for those who want to tell a tale about Linux] given full disk encryption. Even if the SSD were removable, and presuming there is no issue with the SSD -- they fail too -- there is nothing he could have gotten from it. This is true on modern Windows devices as well. There are devices that use passphrase encryption, or similes, but they're a usability problem so it isn't what Apple does.
Devices are lost (failed, stolen, burned, destroyed) as a simple fact of life. Anyone who doesn't have an immediate recovery process with negligible loss simply isn't being a professional. His laptop could have easily been nicked from a coffee shop.
It's why most of us simply don't sweat this at all. I will never be in a situation where I'm desperate to recover what's on a device.
Remarkable that the comments are full of people speculating about failures and then, remarkably, getting angry and on a soap box about their speculation. Computing device failed. Amazing story at 11!
> Data recovery is impossible in most situations given full disk encryption.
Key escrow has been a solved problem for decades, Apple just doesn't implement it (AFAIK, anyway).
And it's not like user-managed keys are that hard anyway. I mean, just install any modern Linux distro with a decent pass phrase and you can securely and safely move that SSD between almost any two laptops on the planet.
OS X does board-locked enclave-managed storage because iOS does board-locked enclave-managed storage, not because it's the right choice for the problem area. It's not a phone; the guy in the linked article lost 800G of video editting work!
Everyone understands the deal with Apple hardware. No one ever thought you could pull out the SSD and stick it in another device. No one is surprised by this reality. No one planned around doing that unless they were profoundly ignorant.
If the T2 failed (it is now integrated right into the M1, so any failure of the mainboard), the data is gone. Everyone should know that by now.
So he went in with his scheme regardless of that. And his work had so little value that if his laptop were stolen, if a single rank of the storage failed, etc, he'd be in the same situation.
He lost data because he was careless in the same foolish way that we read about so often. But people get to beat their ridiculous anti-Apple drums, so here we are.
"OS X does board-locked enclave-managed storage because iOS does board-locked enclave-managed storage"
This is boorish noise. Apple does it because it provides strong storage encryption while imposing no performance or usability problems. You like something better - good for you. I don't. I have zero issues with this reality.
"I lost all my data!" stories are ridiculous nonsense 99% of the time, and this isn't in the 1%.
> Everyone understands the deal with Apple hardware.
The linked article and this thread argues otherwise. But regardless, even if everyone understands "the deal" that doesn't constitute a reply to an argument that this is a bad deal.
>the guy in the linked article lost 800G of video editting work!
In my experience, video editors are the least backed-up PC users.
Large videos are too much data to back up quickly and easily, the deadlines are always yesterday, they're always pushing the hardware's limits, the data is ephemeral so just not quite important enough to pay extra for redundancy, and they know just enough about computers to get themselves in trouble.
> I will never be in a situation where I'm desperate to recover what's on a device.
... again.
I suspect by far the majority of people who know this, learned this the hard way. I know I did.
(And even _after_ learning that, I once left a backpack with my laptop at an outdoor table at a cafe. It also have both the USB drive with my primary backup and the iPod with my secondary backup. I was extremely fortunate that a friendly waitress grabbed it and told management it was mine, and I only spent one sleepless night before collecting it after calling up the next morning... In my defence, this was back before "cloud backup" and high bandwidth internet to make that practical was a thing here. )
Full disk encryption is still done using a key. The owner of the machine will have that key. So he can decrypt the data with the key. Full disk encryption does not mean data recovery is impossible. Your laptop bring owned by Apple, not you is what makes recovery impossible.
In theory yes, but fatality rates for that kind of operation are very high, and having any chance of success requires an expert practitioner. Staffing every Genius Bar with a solder surgeon isn't really practical. BGA chips are simply not designed to be moved.
A soldered SSD is absolutely putting a real limit to the lifespan of your pc
I hadn't really thought of this, but it's a concern for personal use. Not so much for data - I do backups - but because I tend to keep my laptops for ages (currently using an 8 year old MBA). Something to think about, certainly.
> and prefer hardware with replaceable storage like M.2 slots.
I'm not sure how that would have accomplished anything (except a smaller repair bill, but that was footed by the warranty) in this story: either the logic board died and since the storage is encrypted at rest with the key stored in the Secure Enclave, the data is not recoverable; and if the storage is dead, well, the data is gone. Either way the data is as good as gone.
So either way, one lesson. Backup. Twice.
(Also, a brand new laptop has just as much chance of being stolen or suffering water damage or mistaken file erasure or a thousand other things that would destroy the data. Two months without backup is lunacy)
There's no reason you wouldn't have access to the encryption key, though. In a sensible system it would be derivable from your password and data on the drive.
So many people are making the encryption point, and that seems nonresponsive to me. I mean, the whole point here is a demand for Apple to change their board design. If we're going to do that, it's not at all unreasonable to demand that they also support some form of key escrow or user-managed key storage. The software part of the puzzle is significantly cheaper to implement, especially given that all they need to do is copy one of the gazillion variants already shipping.
The drive encryption design is a holdover from iOS, and... a Macbook isn't a phone. People do very different thing with them (the linked article is by a video producer!) and need different solutions.
The whole premise of the T2/Secure Enclave (or TPMs or whatever name is fancied this day if you want to talk non-Apple lingo) is that the disk encryption key (or other private key kind of secrets) cannot be extracted, not by malware, not by knowing your password, not by electronic microscope, not -ever-.
> since the storage is encrypted at rest with the key stored in the Secure Enclave
Bitlocker on W10 allows you to export the long key it to a file or printer. I've used this to swap SSDs from family members laptops with out much friction. This makes for simple upgrades or getting them going quickly after a failure. Perhaps Apple's implementation is different, but it doesn't need to be.
> (Also, a brand new laptop has just as much chance of being stolen or suffering water damage or mistaken file erasure or a thousand other things that would destroy the data. Two months without backup is lunacy)
For laptops used mostly at home, it's surprisingly difficult to kill the SSD inside them. Everyone's risk is different.
Writing on a piece of paper and throwing it to the wind?
Seriously, though, if you have an inch of computing skills, any of the static site generators combined with a free tier CDN like Netlify. The most popular generators are pretty easy to use.
But perhaps I'm underestimating how hard that actually is.
This especially drives me nuts because I use text selection to help with reading on ultra-wide pages when I scroll so I don't lose my place. I hate when I can't select text.
Yes, with uMatrix. Its like ublock but much more configurable. In one dimension you have cookies, images, js, xmlhttprequest, frames, etc; in another dimension you have domain, subdomain, TLD of the site URL; and in the third dimension you have domains that your current site is connected to. Each is configurable at different levels.
It is archived though. The developed stopped working on it I believe
The other way is with the Multi Account Containers, Temporary Containers, and Containerize addons. Make permanent containers for sites where you want to allow cookies to be saved. Let everything else open in temporary containers. Shortly after closing the temporary tab, all cookies (and local storage, etc) for that tab get deleted. Permanent containers keep their data. Containerize lets you add matching rules to URLs without having to visit that URL in a GUI. Handy for redirects.
I use Vivaldi, but on most browsers there is an "Accept Cookies" setting that is tri-state: All, Session Only and Never (third-party cookies is a parallel setting). You can change it to "Never" then set up site-specific exceptions for the sites you do want to allow cookies on, e.g. Hacker News.
Medium won't even render on my old iPad. Just crashes the browser tab on load. I seriously don't know how bad your tech must be if you can't reliably deliver a page of text.
> You can technically desolder the SSD from the logic board
Well, you can, but even that wouldn’t get you your data back. It’s all encrypted, tied to the hardware.
There are data recovery tools for MacBooks, but I suppose in this specific case an essential part for that was broken.
The data probably isn’t worth the price of doing it (no warranty, all money gone if it fails), but if it was you could’ve called up a component level repair shop, which can sometimes fix issues at a fraction of what Apple charges and preserve your data by replacing only broken components instead of rushing to replace the whole board.
And that's a terrible idea to begin with. Yes, encryption is a good thing. But it's only good as long as it's not tied to a particular piece of hardware against user's will. You should be able to remove an SSD from a dead laptop and plug it into a working one, and, after entering the correct password, be able to access it. Apple seems to view this exact scenario as an attack for some reason.
An active component like the T2 can ensure the keys are erased after N failed attempts. A passive encryption key cannot. There are indeed also disadvantages to this.
Similarly on PC, TPM lockout for decrypt PIN after some tries, then BitLocker requires user to input very long generated passphrase (virtually unbreakable, same as Apple's internal key). They can also export encryption key. Of course exported key must be stored to secure place.
This isn't specific to the M1. I had my MBP 2016 13" die in the same exact way about two years ago. Same failure mode where it just refused to boot no matter what I did, though it was possible to sort of turn it on if you left it alone for a couple of days. Was able to use that to pull the data off the machine and create a Time Machine backup, but it turns out that Time Machine can lie to you about having completed a backup so I would have lost all of my data were it not for the manual backup I performed.
What was frustrating to me was that I knew my model had a diagnostics port that allowed direct access to the SSD (see https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/24/apple-special-cdm-tool-macboo...) to pull the data off of it, but the service wasn't offered when I went to get my machine repaired. I was forced to accept the data loss from having the logic board replaced.
I later had bluetooth issues on the same laptop, and that required another logic board replacement. Which, surprise, came with data loss once again. Also had a lot of fun learning with that repair that Apple changed the extension backups are stored as, and Time Machine can't recognize the new one as a restore source for some reason unless you rename the folder to use the old one. Wasted quite a few hours on that, and Apple's phone support had no idea about why Time Machine wasn't seeing it.
Anyway, moral of the story is, backup often, and have more than one backup method, unless you like losing your data.
> Anyway, moral of the story is, backup often, and have more than one backup method, unless you like losing your data.
And I would recommend that no one use Time Machine for backups. I have several anecdotes of my own where TM backups became silently corrupted or a seemingly good backup refused to restore, and you can find many more examples in the Apple forums. An unreliable backup isn’t a backup at all.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Time Machine itself is fundamentally broken and wouldn’t trust it with any of my data. If I went back to using a Mac I’d find some other backup application.
On the other hand, all of my experiences were not recent; maybe Time Machine is fine now. Or maybe the corruption is random enough that you’re safe with 4 copies. In any case, I’d check on your backups regularly to make sure they’re still good.
> this laptop suddenly died when I was using Adobe Photoshop for a project. Yes, dead. It wasn’t taking its time to “shut down”. It just blacked out and showed no signs of life at all. [...] and it just wouldn’t turn on.
I was in a similar situation once. My laptop suddenly died, and it just wouldn't turn on; plugging in the charger would instantly extinguish the charger light, and that light would only come back if I unplugged the charger from the wall and plugged it again to the wall (but not to the laptop). The solution was also similar: the entire motherboard had to be replaced under warranty. The cause was probably a short somewhere on the motherboard's power delivery subsystem.
The main difference: my laptop's storage wasn't soldered onto the motherboard. I lost nothing other than the time it took before the technician came to do the repair.
188 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadI don’t know what the symptoms of an SSD reaching EOL are, would it just stop responding at all?
I don’t think we still have heard anything from Apple about the massive SSD writes and that for me is the biggest concern before making an M1 based purchase.
I’m amazed this person had 800GB of important data on a laptop and yet zero backups. Especially when a backup service like backblaze is $5 a month and you just set it up in 2 minutes and it runs on its own.
Contrary to popular belief, not everyone reaches for someone else's computer to look after their important things.
Sad though it is that they learned their lesson the hard way, they can't really be faulted for it.
From what I’ve read, Apple has fixed this problem in a recent Mac OS version. Apparently, it was a swapping bug.
Posters had narrowed down the excessive writes down by limiting memory usage, so they knew it was a swap problem, and some users said the latest OS fixed it. Now that I’ve checked it again, they’re saying it’s better but not fixed.
See this: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=m1+writes
Not even Apple support knows the cause of this issue. You are better off skipping it altogether and waiting for the M2 or higher. Losing a $1000 laptop due to heavy work is already one unacceptable thing, but replacing the whole unit and losing your work in order to 'fix it' is another unacceptable 'solution'.
Always have a backup handy. I doubt the regular folk buying this machine would be bothered to do this anyway so the risk of this event runs higher for them. Especially when the SSD is baked into the motherboard.
I rest my magnificent case.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26247531
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26247333
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26879674
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887380
> I rest my magnificent case
Perhaps people didn’t care about what you had to say because you come off as insufferable.
Well I guess we'll have to see if the fanatics and the hype squad have learned their lesson into jumping into immature first-gen Apple products.
Or maybe that they now realise that they know I am insufferably right (and hate me for it) and are now coming to terms to what they have just purchased.
Well I guess we'll have to see if the fanatics and the hype squad have learned their lesson into jumping into immature first-gen Apple products.
That's a problem, for everyone using SSD, and for Apple, for not managing write, monitoring it, warning about it, ec., but this not a problem unique to the M1.
The author should add an update to this effect.
There's a reason the Mac Mini has a fan.
And while MacOS sometimes has issues expediently clearing space the was previously used for snapshots, tools like DaisyDisk and others can force its hand if you need.
Bottom line, you don't lose available disk space by using Time Machine.
And yes, you can nuke snapshots preemptively, but often the first visible sign was Mail having corruption issues because it’s database was borked, at which point it was too late.
If your Mac HD is that low on space, you're going to be getting horrible performance. You should sort that out and try to keep around 10% free.
Do NOT trust Time Machine. Back up your data.
And restore it once in a while.
"Backups not issue. Backups very boring. Restore is issue. Restore very exciting."
But yes, you need to check that it can restore every now and then.
Time Machine deletes old data. That is not a good backup plan.
Time Machine is not a long term backup, it’s a safety net.
Migrating Time Machine backups from a USB drive to a network share is not supported, but it's doable, not impossible. (This is something I've done before, and in fact I'm doing this for family right now.)
The issue with having only first-party repair is that you have no choice other than to lose data.
This is one of the reasons the cloud storage services became so popular. Properly backing up data, with multiple backups, not all piled in the flood prone corner of a closet, is not fun.
Edit: typo
Right-to-repair is great and all, but trusting the storage on a laptop is crazy. I've had basically the same thing happen with Dells, etc.
Forget just laptops, though they are more failure prone. Trusting the storage on any single machine for critical work data for any longer than necessary is unprofessional.
But now the poor guy needs to recover a huge partition from partial backups, and that sucks. And it was totally avoidable..
(FWIW: I don't understand your point about not trusting storage on laptops. Modern SSDs are extremely reliable. Sure they can fail, and you should always have a plan for what happens if they do. But in practice you should absolutely trust your laptop storage.)
As a consumer this is perhaps practical advice.
> Trusting the storage on any single machine for critical work data for any longer than necessary is unprofessional.
But if you were a customer, would you be okay with a business losing your vital data because they wanted everything on a single machine? It doesn't matter if it's a laptop, it may be a server on the cloud.
Just plugging them in often isn't enough to make them notice and refresh all data - the SSD doesn't have a clock in so doesn't know it's been unplugged for a long time.
The real answer is "for every month an SSD is powered down, leave it powered up for a day"
Wrong. Stop repeating nonsense.
The original poster stated, "They start heavily corrupting data if left unpowered for around a year or two though, in case this gives anyone false confidence in a use case they aren't designed for." A person asked if all SSDs do that and you said, "Yes, all SSD's suffer this effect." This statement is wrong.
The AnandTech article even mentions the falsehoods and states it wants to clear up the confusion. A drive must meet certain conditions before data loss begins. Simply putting a backup or thumb drive in a safe for several years isn't going to cause data loss and the AnandTech article comes to this conclusion.
Here is another article from PCWorld with commentary from the authors of the 2015 JEDEC presentation that started this hysteria.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2925173/debunked-your-ssd-wo...
This is what I meant. Not that you expect your laptop to fail (or be stolen), but any important work should exist in a recoverable way. OP claims to have lost a lot of data when this happened to them. That should approximately never happen, at least not more than the day's worth when you were off network.
We need right-to-repair (the sane version), but that’s really not the issue here.
And while the RTR laws would have helped here, let's remember there's only one thing we can do in the meantime to put pressure on these companies: don't buy hostile hardware in the first place.
Nobody's perfect. I use an iPhone and I just bought a watch from them. But I think it's equally true that you should be able to keep two thoughts in your head at once: even when buying Apple hardware because you're more or less forced to (or really want to), keep talking about how this is unacceptable and lobby every lawmaker you can. It's not cool.
And Apple replaces the entire motherboard if a component on it fails. The agreement that you may lose data has been around awhile and it's just boilerplate. When mucking around on a board they aren't going to guarantee anything - and I don't know if third party repair shops would do that either. There is always the chance someone screws up and breaks something.
I think the horror stories are going to just explode.
If Apple has any weakness here (and this might be the butterfly keyboard all over again), then their products are going to get absolutely trashed in the media.[0]
[0] - I use apple products pretty much everywhere, so I'm not looking forward to this, just presuming it will highlight any SSD weakness they might actually have.
It's possible, but the "farmer" would have to be very serious about Chia and also not have read any FAQs, not watched any videos, not visited any forums, etc. A healthy fear of plotting on one's boot drive is the first thing drilled into Chia-heads' heads.
The special device could even be another laptop of the same model that supplies power. Disassemble both, connect a cable, and essentially "move" the drive to a different computer even though it's physically still unmoved.
EDIT: Could they in theory add a port to machines going forward that as long as the T2 chip (or what ever they use today, i think they incorperated it into the M1 chip itself) was still functional (as it holds the keys). Sure, why not? But they would have create a way to unlock the T2 (or what ever chip) but apple could create a way either by having a master key or devise keys based on serial numbers, etc etc etc. The Mac they use to recover data via the life boat connector could phone home to Apple and with the right auth be granted an auth to unlock the chip and allow data retrival.
If I were to give apple the benefit of doubt, they might not want to as they don't want a way to be compelled to decrypt customers data on their hardware (Be it a 3 letter agency or a rouge employee).
If you were to replicate that hand shake between the OS and chip, sure apple could have created a “lifeboat connector” on T2 based macs. However the “isolated island” of the PCB communicates with would get more complex (you don’t want to be back powering the whole board from the connector, if there was a simple short on the board somewhere which was preventing the machine from powering on, then with no isolation you could be also “powering that short” from the lifeboat connector and be unable to recover data without more work.
On M1 MacBooks things have been stepped up a notch. The Application processor and the security processor that handles the encryption are now the same chip, so you would have to power a “whole lot more”. To top it off the flash chip which is to your SSD and the RAM chip are on the same package as the M1 unit as one big System On Chip.
Think of it like this, it’s like if a Intel I7 processor also had the ram and SSD on that chip you brought when you built your machine.
Now it’s a lot more harder to create a lifeboat connector. Not impossible but harder.
Now as Apple will have a lot of data on their own repair program they can look into how often they were able to / could be bothered to recover data off their older models and how much it pissed the customer off and probably decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.
If I were giving them the benefit of the doubt. They think their customers data will be more secure without it.
But it’s another reason why right to repair is important. As we have seen with phones, people are willing to write off the phone and pay decent cash to recover the pictures of their kids they had on their phones. With schematics, 3rd parties could much easier create tools and fixes to get the SOC in a workable state just long enough to recover data (Apple R&D prob even have have test boards where they can swap the SOC, If the SOC, Ram, Flash are all ok and not had LCD backlight voltage sent down the data lines... And recover the data. But their "repair techs" have to now learn how to remove the SOC package from the main board).
If the chip that contains the keys itself is dead, even with all documentation and access to parts you wanted, you are SOL as these chips are typically designed to create the keys on chip and never let them out.
I guess one problem is that cross-system data synchronisation is still a non-trivial task.
This issue is quite well known for those who followed the Apple M1 rollout closely. My suspicious is that
1. It is the same USB / Thunderbolt Charging issue again as with previous Intel Mac. Where basically the USB-C somehow fried the CPU. ( Louis Rossmann has tons of video on it )
2. The CPU / System is simply not designed for these type of usage. Especially with zero cooling. ( Sometimes, I would even leave the machine switched on for overnight rendering ) And it could also be other component that overheat.
Apple needs to sell an official Time Capsule and Make Encrypted Backup to iCloud as option for Offline Backup.
Maybe they shouldn’t advertise it as such then?
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a $2400 machine to be left on overnight without worrying about it being fried in the morning.
I really dont think they did. It should be MacBook Pro with proper cooling. And personally I dont think overnight rendering, that is 100% CPU usage for 8+ hours should even be done on a laptop with no cooling fans.
The $2400 price tag was because of Apple's ridiculous memory and Storage upgrade cost.
While I agree that consumer hardware in general and laptops in particular aren't designed for this usage, internal overheating should never be the cause for catastrophic failure.
A system should be designed to throttle down or shut down before risking permanent damage. Should this be a heat related problem, I'd consider it a design flaw.
Degraded performance is acceptable, permanent damage to non-replaceable internal hardware isn't.
> Apple needs to sell an official Time Capsule and Make Encrypted Backup to iCloud as option for Offline Backup.
Not going to happen. Since they disbanded the router team 3 years ago, there's zero chance of a Time Capsule product coming back anytime soon.
They want customers to use iCloud and I think that's the better option for most users. People like the person in this blog are professionals and should use professional backup solutions (whether offline or online).
Agree, except Apple dont think like that anymore.
good point, thanks.
I am very satisfied in my decision to wait a few generations on this.
It never hurts to wait for Apple to fix these issues. By then the software for Apple Silicon will be optimised on a faster chip. (M2 and higher)
Devices are lost (failed, stolen, burned, destroyed) as a simple fact of life. Anyone who doesn't have an immediate recovery process with negligible loss simply isn't being a professional. His laptop could have easily been nicked from a coffee shop.
It's why most of us simply don't sweat this at all. I will never be in a situation where I'm desperate to recover what's on a device.
Remarkable that the comments are full of people speculating about failures and then, remarkably, getting angry and on a soap box about their speculation. Computing device failed. Amazing story at 11!
I will never be in a situation where I’m desperate to recover two months worth of data, but even losing a day is pretty inconvenient.
Key escrow has been a solved problem for decades, Apple just doesn't implement it (AFAIK, anyway).
And it's not like user-managed keys are that hard anyway. I mean, just install any modern Linux distro with a decent pass phrase and you can securely and safely move that SSD between almost any two laptops on the planet.
OS X does board-locked enclave-managed storage because iOS does board-locked enclave-managed storage, not because it's the right choice for the problem area. It's not a phone; the guy in the linked article lost 800G of video editting work!
If the T2 failed (it is now integrated right into the M1, so any failure of the mainboard), the data is gone. Everyone should know that by now.
So he went in with his scheme regardless of that. And his work had so little value that if his laptop were stolen, if a single rank of the storage failed, etc, he'd be in the same situation.
He lost data because he was careless in the same foolish way that we read about so often. But people get to beat their ridiculous anti-Apple drums, so here we are.
"OS X does board-locked enclave-managed storage because iOS does board-locked enclave-managed storage"
This is boorish noise. Apple does it because it provides strong storage encryption while imposing no performance or usability problems. You like something better - good for you. I don't. I have zero issues with this reality.
"I lost all my data!" stories are ridiculous nonsense 99% of the time, and this isn't in the 1%.
The linked article and this thread argues otherwise. But regardless, even if everyone understands "the deal" that doesn't constitute a reply to an argument that this is a bad deal.
In my experience, video editors are the least backed-up PC users.
Large videos are too much data to back up quickly and easily, the deadlines are always yesterday, they're always pushing the hardware's limits, the data is ephemeral so just not quite important enough to pay extra for redundancy, and they know just enough about computers to get themselves in trouble.
That disk can be moved around, you just need the passphrase to open it.
We've been doing this for decades now in linux land...
... again.
I suspect by far the majority of people who know this, learned this the hard way. I know I did.
(And even _after_ learning that, I once left a backpack with my laptop at an outdoor table at a cafe. It also have both the USB drive with my primary backup and the iPod with my secondary backup. I was extremely fortunate that a friendly waitress grabbed it and told management it was mine, and I only spent one sleepless night before collecting it after calling up the next morning... In my defence, this was back before "cloud backup" and high bandwidth internet to make that practical was a thing here. )
I hadn't really thought of this, but it's a concern for personal use. Not so much for data - I do backups - but because I tend to keep my laptops for ages (currently using an 8 year old MBA). Something to think about, certainly.
It’s not a question of if it will fail, just when. If you want that data tomorrow, run an automatic, continuous backup solution.
I'm not sure how that would have accomplished anything (except a smaller repair bill, but that was footed by the warranty) in this story: either the logic board died and since the storage is encrypted at rest with the key stored in the Secure Enclave, the data is not recoverable; and if the storage is dead, well, the data is gone. Either way the data is as good as gone.
So either way, one lesson. Backup. Twice.
(Also, a brand new laptop has just as much chance of being stolen or suffering water damage or mistaken file erasure or a thousand other things that would destroy the data. Two months without backup is lunacy)
The drive encryption design is a holdover from iOS, and... a Macbook isn't a phone. People do very different thing with them (the linked article is by a video producer!) and need different solutions.
Encryption is done using a key. You are the owner of the machine, so you have the key. Just use that key to decrypt your files. Simple.
Bitlocker on W10 allows you to export the long key it to a file or printer. I've used this to swap SSDs from family members laptops with out much friction. This makes for simple upgrades or getting them going quickly after a failure. Perhaps Apple's implementation is different, but it doesn't need to be.
> (Also, a brand new laptop has just as much chance of being stolen or suffering water damage or mistaken file erasure or a thousand other things that would destroy the data. Two months without backup is lunacy)
For laptops used mostly at home, it's surprisingly difficult to kill the SSD inside them. Everyone's risk is different.
Heed this advice folks. Even the new Surface Laptop SSDs are replaceable.
Not for me (I host me own), but for the next time it comes up. I don’t want to tell people “don’t use Medium” without an alternative to suggest.
https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/
Seriously, though, if you have an inch of computing skills, any of the static site generators combined with a free tier CDN like Netlify. The most popular generators are pretty easy to use.
But perhaps I'm underestimating how hard that actually is.
The whole point of medium is anyone can go write without any.
I still hate it, but that's why it continues to exist.
It is archived though. The developed stopped working on it I believe
But yeah, fucke medium
Well, you can, but even that wouldn’t get you your data back. It’s all encrypted, tied to the hardware.
There are data recovery tools for MacBooks, but I suppose in this specific case an essential part for that was broken.
The data probably isn’t worth the price of doing it (no warranty, all money gone if it fails), but if it was you could’ve called up a component level repair shop, which can sometimes fix issues at a fraction of what Apple charges and preserve your data by replacing only broken components instead of rushing to replace the whole board.
And that's a terrible idea to begin with. Yes, encryption is a good thing. But it's only good as long as it's not tied to a particular piece of hardware against user's will. You should be able to remove an SSD from a dead laptop and plug it into a working one, and, after entering the correct password, be able to access it. Apple seems to view this exact scenario as an attack for some reason.
What was frustrating to me was that I knew my model had a diagnostics port that allowed direct access to the SSD (see https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/24/apple-special-cdm-tool-macboo...) to pull the data off of it, but the service wasn't offered when I went to get my machine repaired. I was forced to accept the data loss from having the logic board replaced.
I later had bluetooth issues on the same laptop, and that required another logic board replacement. Which, surprise, came with data loss once again. Also had a lot of fun learning with that repair that Apple changed the extension backups are stored as, and Time Machine can't recognize the new one as a restore source for some reason unless you rename the folder to use the old one. Wasted quite a few hours on that, and Apple's phone support had no idea about why Time Machine wasn't seeing it.
Anyway, moral of the story is, backup often, and have more than one backup method, unless you like losing your data.
And I would recommend that no one use Time Machine for backups. I have several anecdotes of my own where TM backups became silently corrupted or a seemingly good backup refused to restore, and you can find many more examples in the Apple forums. An unreliable backup isn’t a backup at all.
On the other hand, all of my experiences were not recent; maybe Time Machine is fine now. Or maybe the corruption is random enough that you’re safe with 4 copies. In any case, I’d check on your backups regularly to make sure they’re still good.
Maybe because of no internet?
I was in a similar situation once. My laptop suddenly died, and it just wouldn't turn on; plugging in the charger would instantly extinguish the charger light, and that light would only come back if I unplugged the charger from the wall and plugged it again to the wall (but not to the laptop). The solution was also similar: the entire motherboard had to be replaced under warranty. The cause was probably a short somewhere on the motherboard's power delivery subsystem.
The main difference: my laptop's storage wasn't soldered onto the motherboard. I lost nothing other than the time it took before the technician came to do the repair.