10 ms·

> It is especially unlikely to be the underlying cause of unexpected and seemingly premature catastrophic SSD failure. One of my graduate students experienced

> It is especially unlikely to be the underlying cause of unexpected and seemingly premature catastrophic SSD failure. One of my graduate students experienced this, the hard way: writing up his thesis, his mum plugged in "the wrong USB C" charger. I don't know exactly what happened, but the board was utterly fried. The problem with the soldered-to-the-motherboard, everything-utterly-encrypted approach is that it's almost impossible to do data recovery. On the M1+ models, you literally can't do anything except semi-fix the motherboard as the flash and its controllers are integrated and the keys are cryptographically securely stored. This video [1] shows what data recovery is really like -- I don't often link to YT videos, but it is an hour long, involves an awful lot of BGA de-balling and re-balling and the scouring of spare chips from other donor dead machines, as Apple doesn't let manufacturers sell the chips separately and datasheets are all NDA'd. We're very much in the part of the curve where you'd need a lab and a lot of serious work to get data off these things without either sacrificial macs or luck (e.g. one blow voltage regulator). Of course, the flip side of this is that your data is really, really secure. You just have to be damn sure that you back it up correctly. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=110x5rMHCIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=110x5rMHCIw

mschuster91 5y ago
> You just have to be damn sure that you back it up correctly. Most somewhat serious NAS appliances offer being a TimeMachine server which is more than enough for most people.
donkeyd 5y ago
> soldered-to-the-motherboard, everything-utterly-encrypted approach is that it's almost impossible to do data recovery Well, that's kind of the point. > You just have to be damn sure that you back it up correctly. Exactly. And that's as easy as plugging in an external hard drive occasionally, or storing critical files in the cloud.
- CelestialTeapot 5y ago
  >> soldered-to-the-motherboard, everything-utterly-encrypted approach is that it's almost impossible to do data recovery >Well, that's kind of the point. Not that I don't appreciate a security-minded platform, it just seems overkill for 99% of the people who'll purchase them, and do nothing but cause heartache when the internal SSD fails. And fail they do. it's rare, but I've had several SSDs (Toshiba and Crucial, if it matters) fail within 1-2 years of moderate usage. No warning there was an issue, the drives just disappeared one day and I was left looking for backups.
  - katbyte 5y ago
    > 99% of the people I think you underestimate this number. Most businesses are going to want security/encryption over ability to recover data to prevent leaking secrets in the case of a lost/stolen laptop. as for everyone else, backups really need to become the norm for everyone because as you say any HDD/SSD can fail for any reason anytime beyond any possible recovery apple laptop or not.
  - notriddle 5y ago
    > Not that I don't appreciate a security-minded platform, it just seems overkill for 99% of the people who'll purchase them No man is an island. If my mom is insecure, then all the messages I sent her are leaked, too, no matter how secure I try to be. If my boss is insecure, then I'm even worse off than that. Also, if high-security stuff is normalized, then you don't wind up stuck in a place where you have to choose between "the secure option" and "the option that can actually run the apps I need." E2E encrypting the whole world is also the best defense against the government passing laws that make E2E encryption illegal.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      >E2E encrypting the whole world is also the best defense against the government passing laws that make E2E encryption illegal. The government doesn't need to pass laws to ban encryption (at least in America) since they design the encryption standards themselves. It's basically common knowledge at this point that everything NIST cranks out is vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis beyond the domain of public understanding. Apple, Google, Facebook and the other top dogs all help create the illusion of choice in exchange for keeping the SEC off their backs.
- StillBored 5y ago
  Back it up to some cloud vendor that also holds the encryption keys... Brilliant bit of security there... /s
  - josephg 5y ago
    If you don’t want that, back it up to a cloud service that doesn’t hold the encryption keys. Eg, use tarsnap. It’s your computer and your data.
    - StillBored 5y ago
      Thanks, I don't remember trying tarsnap. I use $OTHERBIGVENDOR and its been sticky, because I have ~60T of large files (miniDV .mpg captures/4k video/etc) mixed with an insane number of .5k files from git repos/etc. That combination has broken just about every modern cloud backup application I've tried to use over the ~10 years that meets a short list of minimal features I require (locally stored encryption keys for one). It actually breaks $OTHERBIGVENDOR in its default configuration as well, but I've collected a pile of tweaks/etc that keep it functional although I've managed at one point to cause my account to go into a reindexing mode on the servers that didn't complete for months too. So, maybe at some point. I've got some experience in the space :) and I've considered writing my own when I eventually give up on $OTHERBIGVENDOR. So many of them are written in "modern" languages and the clients are outrageously slow, or get exponentially slower as the data set grows. I've looked at tarsnap in passing in the past, but haven't gotten around to trying it because from their description of what appears to be a traditional referenced counted global dedupe. I suspected it of having problems when the hash map need to track 50T+ unique hashes from all those video files across backups. PS: That doesn't mean there aren't good tools, my local backups are via rsnapshot to an offline USB+RAID I plug in once in a while.
      - shalmanese 5y ago
        If you have 60T of files, then you're already free from the problem since Apple doesn't sell a machine with 60T of soldered on SSD.
- thefz 5y ago
  > or storing critical files in the cloud. No. I refuse to let my vacation photos, hard drive images or hell, even my wallpaper collection to leave my house. No. I refuse. My data is my data.
  - chaoskanzlerin 5y ago
    Nothing stopping you from putting NextCloud on a Raspberry Pi
    - StillBored 5y ago
      I don't know about the mac, but I tried to do this for the wife/kids i-devices, and it was an utter failure. 3rd party backup apps are at a huge disadvantage on ios because apparently they can't run in the background long enough to keep things synced unless they also require _GPS_ service notifications (or at least that is how the nextcloud app works around it). Which in turn eats even more battery to work around ios's inability to flag apps as trusted system services and provide extra warnings/whatever during install (or app store acceptance might be a better plan).
  - donkeyd 5y ago
    > or There was another simple option. You're free to use that one.
  - robertoandred 5y ago
    What if your house burns down?
    - katbyte 5y ago
      i keep a copy of my most important files in a safe deposit box
      - mindslight 5y ago
        I keep my FLAC collection in a safe deposit box. More important files get stored on HDDs and MLC flash. Storage is cheap.
- nottorp 5y ago
  > > soldered-to-the-motherboard, everything-utterly-encrypted approach is that it's almost impossible to do data recovery > Well, that's kind of the point. Great; how do we opt out?
  - Heliosmaster 5y ago
    with different machines? The framework laptop doesn't work this way, afaik
    - nottorp 5y ago
      Too bad i switched to Mac OS from Linux. The OS matters to me and OS X is still the least annoying.
      - judge2020 5y ago
        That really just shows that everything has tradeoffs. I'd Love if Windows could run on top of the Linux kernel (as in, nvidia drivers and all the Windows compatibility while being able to do stuff like `lspci` to see my real hardware - WSL2 doesn't do full PCI device passthrough yet) but that's unlikely to happen with how much the Windows team is seemingly trying to simplify their testing infrastructure (removing CPU support and removing user choice).
      - GuB-42 5y ago
        Apple is not about giving you options. Either you go the Apple way or you leave the ecosystem entirely, and except for the very beginning when Steve Wozniak still had some influence, Apple has always been like that. It has advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is obvious: few options. But the advantage is that they can make a consistent ecosystem, with sensible choices, and not dragged down by compatibility issues. It "just works". Not my thing but I totally understand those who love Apple. The way you do recovery with Apple is via Time Machine backups, use that. Desktop Linux is the opposite, lots of options, but perhaps because of it, it doesn't have the same polish as Apple, and even Microsoft products, or, using your words "it is annoying".
- grishka 5y ago
  > Well, that's kind of the point. Being able to yoink the SSD from the original machine, plug it into another compatible one, and decrypt the contents with your password, is not a vulnerability, it's a feature.
  - sroussey 5y ago
    I think that’s a joke? I mean, why even encrypt it in that case? It’s not like the drive is a web service that will detect and block your password attempts…
    - grishka 5y ago
      No it's not a joke. If the password is sufficiently complex, it can't be brute forced in a reasonable amount of time. But it's still a way for you to get your data back having only the SSD on which it is stored. Or, well, fine, let there be an active element. But let me export the master key then. It's my device, I have root access to it, I should be allowed to do that. And, yes, do still put the SSD into a slot. > I mean, why even encrypt it in that case? Yeah because your time machine backup drive that's encrypted with "just" a password (you did encrypt it, right?) is somehow more secure than an internal SSD encrypted in the same exact way.
      - judge2020 5y ago
        > But let me export the master key then. You can do this encryption shindig with the ability to export by not using FileVault and using your own encryption software - Apple just doesn't allow this by default. In fact, why only store it on the computer? Rclone can upload and replicate an encrypted (via a long salt + password) copy of your data to dozens of cloud providers. Your encrypted data could be on 3 cloud providers in 10 physically separate locations on 30 different hard drives at once, possibly even in separate hemispheres. Or chuck it into S3 replication and be in all 81 availability zones if you so wish.
      - sroussey 5y ago
        I mean, just turn off encryption if that’s what you want. I don’t think you grasp how the encryption keys are generated, derived, and stored. And I doubt you are using a password the length of the key. Well, maybe you create a USB human interface device that fits on your keyring to type it for you. I do have something like that for one time codes, but if that is your sophistication level, then we wouldn’t have this discussion really. I feel for the “it’s mine, I bought it” logic, and I miss the days when our rights were more absolute. But that’s not today.
- dirkg 5y ago
  the motivation for soldered everything is profit margins and the ripoff prices for upgrades. Not security. There is no additional security here
  - threeseed 5y ago
    Of course there is additional security. You can't just physically remove the SSD from the machine, place it in another and brute force the encryption.
    - xxs 5y ago
      of course you can desolder and move the chips - all you need is a hot air station and some flux. It's of course harder but nothing even remotely close to breaking the encryption itself, like orders of magnitude easier - any hobbist can do it. It's another story, a part of the encryption is stored in yet another place on Macs, which it'd be still stored there if the SSD could be moved in/out.
notimetorelax 5y ago
These days I don’t understand why people don’t sync their important files to cloud. Dropbox has a free layer that’s perfectly fit for a theses.
- Chocola 5y ago
  Maybe because not everyone likes to share their most important files with a third party? Or because of providers scanning files or stuff like: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive-idUSKBN1ZK1CT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
  - kube-system 5y ago
    If you seriously consider a state actor to be a threat, then you likely make many other compromises to your ability to conveniently perform disaster recovery. There is not much overlap between these use-cases: * I need an easy way to recover my family pictures because I didn't make backups and * I have state actors interested in my data If you really have state actor threats, you probably like that M1 Macs are very hard to perform data-recovery from.
    - Chocola 5y ago
      If you are a state actor you probably love M1 Macs. You literally can't restore them without phoning home. Everone should consider state actors as a threat because they are. They maybe are not specifically after you. But every now and then some big box gets popped leaking all kinds of personal information (including yours) and the actors are probably state sponsored. Also it is not state actors scanning your data, many cloud providers do so. If you have a state actor as threat model you probably want to remove iCloud backups (see link): "Apple’s iCloud, on the other hand, can be searched in secret. In the first half of last year, the period covered by Apple’s most recent semiannual transparency report on requests for data it receives from government agencies, U.S. authorities armed with regular court papers asked for and obtained full device backups or other iCloud content in 1,568 cases, covering about 6,000 accounts."
morpheuskafka 5y ago
I work for my university's helpdesk and a lot of students learn this the hard way every day. We always require users to assume full risk of data loss whenever they check in for a repair. For most computers, if they aren't okay with that, we can just tell them to go to a third party shop and have the drive pulled out and imaged first. For recent Macs we basically just have to tell them it's gone for good if we can't get the machine booting without having to swap the system board.
ngcc_hk 5y ago
You always do backup (another hard drive), GitHub (these days free private repro), Dropbox, iCloud, … etc. Totslly rely upon a hard disk … a big lesson to learn.

mschuster91 5y ago

> You just have to be damn sure that you back it up correctly. Most somewhat serious NAS appliances offer being a TimeMachine server which is more than enough for most people.

donkeyd 5y ago

> soldered-to-the-motherboard, everything-utterly-encrypted approach is that it's almost impossible to do data recovery Well, that's kind of the point. > You just have to be damn sure that you back it up correctly. Exactly. And that's as easy as plugging in an external hard drive occasionally, or storing critical files in the cloud.

CelestialTeapot 5y ago
>> soldered-to-the-motherboard, everything-utterly-encrypted approach is that it's almost impossible to do data recovery >Well, that's kind of the point. Not that I don't appreciate a security-minded platform, it just seems overkill for 99% of the people who'll purchase them, and do nothing but cause heartache when the internal SSD fails. And fail they do. it's rare, but I've had several SSDs (Toshiba and Crucial, if it matters) fail within 1-2 years of moderate usage. No warning there was an issue, the drives just disappeared one day and I was left looking for backups.
- katbyte 5y ago
  > 99% of the people I think you underestimate this number. Most businesses are going to want security/encryption over ability to recover data to prevent leaking secrets in the case of a lost/stolen laptop. as for everyone else, backups really need to become the norm for everyone because as you say any HDD/SSD can fail for any reason anytime beyond any possible recovery apple laptop or not.
- notriddle 5y ago
  > Not that I don't appreciate a security-minded platform, it just seems overkill for 99% of the people who'll purchase them No man is an island. If my mom is insecure, then all the messages I sent her are leaked, too, no matter how secure I try to be. If my boss is insecure, then I'm even worse off than that. Also, if high-security stuff is normalized, then you don't wind up stuck in a place where you have to choose between "the secure option" and "the option that can actually run the apps I need." E2E encrypting the whole world is also the best defense against the government passing laws that make E2E encryption illegal.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    >E2E encrypting the whole world is also the best defense against the government passing laws that make E2E encryption illegal. The government doesn't need to pass laws to ban encryption (at least in America) since they design the encryption standards themselves. It's basically common knowledge at this point that everything NIST cranks out is vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis beyond the domain of public understanding. Apple, Google, Facebook and the other top dogs all help create the illusion of choice in exchange for keeping the SEC off their backs.
StillBored 5y ago
Back it up to some cloud vendor that also holds the encryption keys... Brilliant bit of security there... /s
- josephg 5y ago
  If you don’t want that, back it up to a cloud service that doesn’t hold the encryption keys. Eg, use tarsnap. It’s your computer and your data.
  - StillBored 5y ago
    Thanks, I don't remember trying tarsnap. I use $OTHERBIGVENDOR and its been sticky, because I have ~60T of large files (miniDV .mpg captures/4k video/etc) mixed with an insane number of .5k files from git repos/etc. That combination has broken just about every modern cloud backup application I've tried to use over the ~10 years that meets a short list of minimal features I require (locally stored encryption keys for one). It actually breaks $OTHERBIGVENDOR in its default configuration as well, but I've collected a pile of tweaks/etc that keep it functional although I've managed at one point to cause my account to go into a reindexing mode on the servers that didn't complete for months too. So, maybe at some point. I've got some experience in the space :) and I've considered writing my own when I eventually give up on $OTHERBIGVENDOR. So many of them are written in "modern" languages and the clients are outrageously slow, or get exponentially slower as the data set grows. I've looked at tarsnap in passing in the past, but haven't gotten around to trying it because from their description of what appears to be a traditional referenced counted global dedupe. I suspected it of having problems when the hash map need to track 50T+ unique hashes from all those video files across backups. PS: That doesn't mean there aren't good tools, my local backups are via rsnapshot to an offline USB+RAID I plug in once in a while.
    - shalmanese 5y ago
      If you have 60T of files, then you're already free from the problem since Apple doesn't sell a machine with 60T of soldered on SSD.
thefz 5y ago
> or storing critical files in the cloud. No. I refuse to let my vacation photos, hard drive images or hell, even my wallpaper collection to leave my house. No. I refuse. My data is my data.
- chaoskanzlerin 5y ago
  Nothing stopping you from putting NextCloud on a Raspberry Pi
  - StillBored 5y ago
    I don't know about the mac, but I tried to do this for the wife/kids i-devices, and it was an utter failure. 3rd party backup apps are at a huge disadvantage on ios because apparently they can't run in the background long enough to keep things synced unless they also require _GPS_ service notifications (or at least that is how the nextcloud app works around it). Which in turn eats even more battery to work around ios's inability to flag apps as trusted system services and provide extra warnings/whatever during install (or app store acceptance might be a better plan).
- donkeyd 5y ago
  > or There was another simple option. You're free to use that one.
- robertoandred 5y ago
  What if your house burns down?
  - katbyte 5y ago
    i keep a copy of my most important files in a safe deposit box
    - mindslight 5y ago
      I keep my FLAC collection in a safe deposit box. More important files get stored on HDDs and MLC flash. Storage is cheap.
nottorp 5y ago
> > soldered-to-the-motherboard, everything-utterly-encrypted approach is that it's almost impossible to do data recovery > Well, that's kind of the point. Great; how do we opt out?
- Heliosmaster 5y ago
  with different machines? The framework laptop doesn't work this way, afaik
  - nottorp 5y ago
    Too bad i switched to Mac OS from Linux. The OS matters to me and OS X is still the least annoying.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      That really just shows that everything has tradeoffs. I'd Love if Windows could run on top of the Linux kernel (as in, nvidia drivers and all the Windows compatibility while being able to do stuff like `lspci` to see my real hardware - WSL2 doesn't do full PCI device passthrough yet) but that's unlikely to happen with how much the Windows team is seemingly trying to simplify their testing infrastructure (removing CPU support and removing user choice).
    - GuB-42 5y ago
      Apple is not about giving you options. Either you go the Apple way or you leave the ecosystem entirely, and except for the very beginning when Steve Wozniak still had some influence, Apple has always been like that. It has advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is obvious: few options. But the advantage is that they can make a consistent ecosystem, with sensible choices, and not dragged down by compatibility issues. It "just works". Not my thing but I totally understand those who love Apple. The way you do recovery with Apple is via Time Machine backups, use that. Desktop Linux is the opposite, lots of options, but perhaps because of it, it doesn't have the same polish as Apple, and even Microsoft products, or, using your words "it is annoying".
grishka 5y ago
> Well, that's kind of the point. Being able to yoink the SSD from the original machine, plug it into another compatible one, and decrypt the contents with your password, is not a vulnerability, it's a feature.
- sroussey 5y ago
  I think that’s a joke? I mean, why even encrypt it in that case? It’s not like the drive is a web service that will detect and block your password attempts…
  - grishka 5y ago
    No it's not a joke. If the password is sufficiently complex, it can't be brute forced in a reasonable amount of time. But it's still a way for you to get your data back having only the SSD on which it is stored. Or, well, fine, let there be an active element. But let me export the master key then. It's my device, I have root access to it, I should be allowed to do that. And, yes, do still put the SSD into a slot. > I mean, why even encrypt it in that case? Yeah because your time machine backup drive that's encrypted with "just" a password (you did encrypt it, right?) is somehow more secure than an internal SSD encrypted in the same exact way.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      > But let me export the master key then. You can do this encryption shindig with the ability to export by not using FileVault and using your own encryption software - Apple just doesn't allow this by default. In fact, why only store it on the computer? Rclone can upload and replicate an encrypted (via a long salt + password) copy of your data to dozens of cloud providers. Your encrypted data could be on 3 cloud providers in 10 physically separate locations on 30 different hard drives at once, possibly even in separate hemispheres. Or chuck it into S3 replication and be in all 81 availability zones if you so wish.
    - sroussey 5y ago
      I mean, just turn off encryption if that’s what you want. I don’t think you grasp how the encryption keys are generated, derived, and stored. And I doubt you are using a password the length of the key. Well, maybe you create a USB human interface device that fits on your keyring to type it for you. I do have something like that for one time codes, but if that is your sophistication level, then we wouldn’t have this discussion really. I feel for the “it’s mine, I bought it” logic, and I miss the days when our rights were more absolute. But that’s not today.
dirkg 5y ago
the motivation for soldered everything is profit margins and the ripoff prices for upgrades. Not security. There is no additional security here
- threeseed 5y ago
  Of course there is additional security. You can't just physically remove the SSD from the machine, place it in another and brute force the encryption.
  - xxs 5y ago
    of course you can desolder and move the chips - all you need is a hot air station and some flux. It's of course harder but nothing even remotely close to breaking the encryption itself, like orders of magnitude easier - any hobbist can do it. It's another story, a part of the encryption is stored in yet another place on Macs, which it'd be still stored there if the SSD could be moved in/out.

notimetorelax 5y ago

These days I don’t understand why people don’t sync their important files to cloud. Dropbox has a free layer that’s perfectly fit for a theses.

Chocola 5y ago
Maybe because not everyone likes to share their most important files with a third party? Or because of providers scanning files or stuff like: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive-idUSKBN1ZK1CT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
- kube-system 5y ago
  If you seriously consider a state actor to be a threat, then you likely make many other compromises to your ability to conveniently perform disaster recovery. There is not much overlap between these use-cases: * I need an easy way to recover my family pictures because I didn't make backups and * I have state actors interested in my data If you really have state actor threats, you probably like that M1 Macs are very hard to perform data-recovery from.
  - Chocola 5y ago
    If you are a state actor you probably love M1 Macs. You literally can't restore them without phoning home. Everone should consider state actors as a threat because they are. They maybe are not specifically after you. But every now and then some big box gets popped leaking all kinds of personal information (including yours) and the actors are probably state sponsored. Also it is not state actors scanning your data, many cloud providers do so. If you have a state actor as threat model you probably want to remove iCloud backups (see link): "Apple’s iCloud, on the other hand, can be searched in secret. In the first half of last year, the period covered by Apple’s most recent semiannual transparency report on requests for data it receives from government agencies, U.S. authorities armed with regular court papers asked for and obtained full device backups or other iCloud content in 1,568 cases, covering about 6,000 accounts."

morpheuskafka 5y ago

I work for my university's helpdesk and a lot of students learn this the hard way every day. We always require users to assume full risk of data loss whenever they check in for a repair. For most computers, if they aren't okay with that, we can just tell them to go to a third party shop and have the drive pulled out and imaged first. For recent Macs we basically just have to tell them it's gone for good if we can't get the machine booting without having to swap the system board.

ngcc_hk 5y ago

You always do backup (another hard drive), GitHub (these days free private repro), Dropbox, iCloud, … etc. Totslly rely upon a hard disk … a big lesson to learn.