The Rescue Mission

A story of bankruptcy, obsolescence, and the fate of my pictures from 20 years ago

Quietly humming on my desk right now is a white-plastic 2009 MacBook laptop running Mac OS X El Capitan. It’s connected to a 2012 Drobo 5D hard drive array with a flickering activity light. They are working together on a very important task.

No, I’m not a time traveler. Nor am I so nostalgic that I would try to nurse along decades-old hardware into the modern age.

I am on a mission. I’m determined to retrieve pictures that I took 20 years ago. To help me, I’ve enlisted the help of a few unlikely characters, a band of aging old has-beens.

Apple has long since stopped supporting plastic MacBooks. Drobo isn’t even a company anymore. And the captor of my images, Aperture, was jettisoned in 2015.

Until this point, I had never worried much about the safety of those memories because Apple had promised an escape key: Photos for macOS (Aperture’s replacement). If I wanted to peer into an Aperture library, all I had to do was connect the Drobo to a current computer and open the catalog with the Photos app. That was the deal. Or was it?