The topic of backups came and a statement was made that in theory, time machine can be used to restore the whole disk. I’ve not subscribed to that in practice and run SuperDuper! on all my [important/critical] macs. I had my first SSD failure–mac was stuck on beachball so I tried to reboot and got nothing but a white screen. On the other side of the troubleshooting trail, I installed a new HD and did a Time Machine recovery of the whole disk. It worked! Yeah! It took around 15 hours. Yikes! But it worked.