I know, I know... I should have learned my lesson the first time. But no, here I am again, having lost another round of precious pictures due to a backup failure. And it is okay to put all the blame on myself this time (and a tiny "wtf" on MacOS too).

What happened?

Yesterday I decided it would be a good time to check the privacy settings on my MacBook. I found that the Apple Cloud completely synced with every other setting. I noticed that the only thing synced was my iPad, but still, I did not want to risk that any of my data would be synced to the cloud. So I disabled the sync for everything, including photos. There was a little pop-up, which asked me to delete all synced Photos on the device. As I did take some photos with my iPad, which might have been synced, I thankfully clicked "Yes". I did not think about the possibility that this would go into my $HOME/Pictures directory and just wipe everything.

What I tried to recover

So after I noticed my fuck-up (which was a day after), I checked all my backups, but none had my images. While I installed nix-darwin on this device a month before, none of the services I configured in my flake for home-manager worked, as they are built on top of systemd, which is not available on macOS. There are services in nix-darwin which are using launchd, but none for borg/borgmatic. Hence, I did not have automatic backups yet. As for manual backups, I regularly ran borgmatic, but my config excluded the bulky files such as videos and raw images (CR2 and CR3).

Then I found a Lightroom Preview file. But here again, I was not able to extract the pictures either. I found a forum where extraction is discussed, but I might have been too brain-fogged at that moment to follow.

Verdict

Nevertheless, my images are gone, the backup routine is in the works (the blog post will follow), and I miss the easy customizability of my system, because macOS seems to get in the way when doing more advanced stuff like automated backups with a script. Be aware of this when turning off your iCloud backups, even when you do not use this stuff!