Today, for no apparent reason, my 2021 Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 experienced a sudden power failure. This was the second or third time I had experienced abrupt restarts, and, apparently, the last.

I have spent the last four or five hours tearing down the laptop trying to troubleshoot what went wrong, and in the process, have thought of several ways that I could have been better prepared for such an eventuality.

In no particular order, here are some things that you may realize after a sudden loss of digital competence, and might want to realize before your laptop shuts down for the last time:

1. Backing up is not a luxury, it's a necessity. It's only a matter of time.
2. There is probably a gap between how often you think you should back up, and how often you back up. Try to split the difference.
3. Hard-drives are expensive, but lack of backup hard drives is more expensive.
4. A good back-up system doesn't just include (multiple, offsite, verified) back-ups. It also includes a spare laptop. And it also includes the piece I was missing: a way to get the drive from your primary laptop into your secondary laptop.
5. Multi-factor authentication is a key failure point, so make a plan. Personally, I think mandatory 2FA does more harm than good: The number of times that I have been slowed down at critical times (such as when fending off a spam attack), or fully locked out of my accounts for stupid reasons, far outweighs the number of times my data has been hacked because I didn't have 2FA enabled (~0). MFA is good, but if the narrative is that it's there for the user's benefit, maybe check in with the user about their priorities?
6. Inspiring tangent: there are still people out there that are incredibly hardcore about repairing laptops. Following ten-page troubleshooting threads on the badcaps forums, where a Fluke meter and thermal camera are table stakes, makes me feel like a Neanderthal with a soldering iron. This is a good thing.
7. Maybe don't buy a laptop that's famous for having the motherboard go bad, and has liquid metal thermal paste that melts and runs out and short circuits the motherboard?
8. If you insist on buying this laptop, maybe learn about these weaknesses before you get all clever and dock your laptop on its side so you can run performance profile all the time with custom fan curves.
9. If you're wondering how to get around to daily-driving OpenBSD, catastrophic power failure on your Linux laptop is a solid option.

Conclusion

One: take a moment to be grateful for the fact that your computer works and you still have access to all your data.

Two: Go back-up your computer, right now.