So my dad and I decided today was the day to factory reset an old MacBook of his. We had been meaning to do this for a long time, but hadn't gotten the chance until today.
He already made a backup of everything on a drive of his so we got cracking. I restarted the computer and put it into Recovery Mode.
Then we went into Disk Utility. Now, here's where things got dicey, there were two drives under a category called "Macintosh" so we didn't know which to delete. After looking up a guide online, my dad saw that we should just go ahead and erase the entire category. So we did. And then he said, "Wait, I think we did this wrong."
Turns out we should have enabled "show all drives" so we could see an option called "Apple SSD", then we should have deleted THAT whole thing instead. He looked pretty nervous about it, but I reassured him that we had a backup and everything was probably fine. We deleted the entire category anyway.
Dad wanted to check if we still had the backup after that, so we checked out the drive we had plugged in. We opened a new finder window, and the drive was there, but something was a bit strange about it. No icons were on any of the files, but we saw our stuff was there so we brushed it off, unplugging the drive without ejecting properly, which I hadn't noticed until now.
Then we tried running the Mac OS Ventura installer, and it said we needed to be on WiFi, but for some reason you couldn't turn on or off WiFi, or connect to a network. At this point I was starting to get a bit nervous myself, I thought we deleted a driver or something and broke the entire computer.
But eventually, the WiFi turned off by itself and we were able to start installing Mac OS. Dad realized something though.
"Did we delete the data on this drive when we erased that disk category?"
My dad and I discussed for a moment and tried to figure out why this would have even happened. I was trying so hard to reason with myself, why would the drive even have been deleted? We didn't touch it at all with disk utility... I thought anyway.
Dad wanted to double check that the drive was OK, so we borrowed my mom's computer so we could check.
We plugged the drive in. Nothing.
Now, I have nightmares about this sort of stuff. Losing precious data that I know will never be recovered. And it's terrible in real life, but I also deny things a ton before I allow reality to sink in, so we unplugged and plugged it back in. Nothing again.
Then we tried another port. Nada.
Dad already put his face in his hands, as we realized that we had lost many important photos and documents. I wanted to try a couple more things before we gave up, though. I unplugged the USB hub on the computer and plugged the drive in directly. Still nothing, and at this point we knew that was it, but we checked Disk Utility to make sure.
Suddenly, in the Finder window behind Disk Utility, the sidebar's item positions shifted by one. "Hey, wait, the sidebar just moved!" We looked at each other, the color coming back to our faces. Dad opened the drive and BOOM! Everything was there!
We laughed for about a solid 5 minutes about what had just happened and shared a sparkling water, toasting to "data".
Ugh. What an emotional rollercoaster. Looking back, I don't know why we were so worried, there was nothing that could have ever happened to the data on that drive. As I write this, that Mac is installing Mac OS Ventura and should be perfectly fine when I wake up in the morning and see that everything works... hopefully.
P.S. My dad just mentioned to me that he had a backup of his work computer. He had moved all of the stuff on the Mac we were worried about to that one when he got it, so we were literally worried about nothing. Ha!