This is a story that I started writing back in 2015. Life events prevented me from posting it back then but I felt that it was still worth sharing. I decided to kick off 2015 with a fresh install of my MacBook Pro. So I checked the status of my Time Capsule, made sure that my backup was current and off I went.

I proceeded to wipe my Mac and start the install. When it was time to restore from a backup I selected my Time Capsule and waited, but the next screen never loaded. The horrific truth started to set in. The Time Capsule hard drive was done and I just wiped the only other copy of my data.

As I cried inside I remembered that I purchased SpinRite many years ago, just in case. With the help of the iFixit site I had the drive out of the Time Capsule in no time and SpinRite working on it.

When SpinRite finished running level two, it didn’t find any issues. But when I plugged the drive back into the Time Capsule, I was successful in restoring my files. What started as a disastrous data loss for me became another SpinRite saves the day story.

After a lesson well learned, I applied Leo’s 3-2-1 backup strategy. Today my data gets synced to two Drobos (hence the two local copies). Then it gets uploaded offsite to the cloud via Backblaze.