Whilst I was stranded in Madrid after having my passport stolen in Barcelona, I wrote a Magnum Opus of my experiences so that anyone going through the same harrowing situation would have a clear and empathetic guide to follow.

On returning to London, I decided to reinstall MacOS on my laptop and set it up securely, following this excellent guide. I made sure I had nothing I cared about on the drive (it was a new laptop), and proceeded to reformat…

…forgetting about the nearly finished blog post that was not checked in to git.

Luckily I had sent it to someone for review as an HTML file (so they could see it rendered), which I recovered. Thanks to this awesome converter, I regained an almost final draft of that piece.

It required some TLC, e.g. all images referenced the domain and not the filesystem path, and the emoji were made into images, but everything else worked out of the box.

Lessons learned:

1. Don’t assume everything thing that is a git repo is checked in.
2. Back up your drives.
3. Sharing drafts with people can function as an effective last-resort backup system.