(Not actually my laptop!)
I’ve been battling against technology recently – last weekend, my otherwise reliable ~2011-era Macbook Pro started doing a boot loop over and over.
I’d seen this happen before about a month ago but after a couple loops, it seemed to come back to life so instead of taking it into the shop for a check-up, I made sure my backups were up-to-date and carried on.
Luckily I did as the machine didn’t come back to life this time and just kept restarting. I took it in to a repair shop that said there was an issue with the logic board.
That got me thinking about *finally* buying a new laptop but then I managed to find someone on a message board who said they could replace the logic board for $300. That sounded better than $3000 for a new MacBook so I dropped it off and had it back the same night.
Because it was the logic board and not the hard drive, I didn’t even have to restore my backup which was a bonus.
Then this past weekend, my (also outdated but mostly reliable) iPhone 6 froze up on me and wouldn’t start past the red “battery charging” icon. Luckily, I knew it had been backed up to the cloud recently so when we got home, I put it in recovery mode, reset it to factory and then restored the backup, only losing a few pictures I’d taken over the weekend that didn’t backup because we weren’t on wifi and I didn’t have it set to backup over cellular.
So the lesson in all this? The obvious one is to make sure you have backups of your hard drives/smartphones as you never know when a device might crash/die/fall in the toilet.
And that goes doubly so if you’re going to be cheap and not update your technology when it dies but only when it reaches absolute end-of-life, being held together by replacement logic boards and overheated batteries! 😉
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