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by Const-me 1476 days ago
The valuable data is backed up properly. And a laptop is usually a secondary computer i.e. there’s not much there to begin with.

But I don’t like to lose any data at all if avoidable, no matter how unimportant that data is. I still keep VHD disk images from these 3 old laptops, thanks to nearly exponential decline of disk costs per TB.
1 comments
adiM 1476 days ago
> And a laptop is usually a secondary computer

Definitely not true. For most college students, a laptop is their only computer.

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Const-me 1475 days ago
My comment was about my own use cases. As for students, I think repairability is even more important for them.

Sometimes laptops are stolen or destroyed completely like dropped into the sea, for that they need to backup data.

But I think these cases are rare. Displays, hinges, and motherboards fail way more often, IMO. It’s nice to be able to recover data by moving SSD from the broken laptop into a USB3 enclosure, these enclosures are sold for $20-40. Another good option is getting another laptop based on the same chipset, and simply replacing the disk. None of these options are available for laptops with soldered SSDs.

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