Wait are you telling me you were doing all your backup manually? lol I learned this one the hard way too but in a different way. I had a laptop get stolen out of my car in Barcelona like 3 years ago and lost a whole quarter of lesson plans I'd been tweaking for my classes. Took me forever to rebuild them from memory. Now I do this dumb thing where I keep a tiny portable SSD in my actual pocket when I travel, plus I have two cloud backups that sync automatically whenever I hit decent wifi. It's overkill probably but losing that client money hurts way worse than buying a couple extra drives. The spotty wifi thing is real though, sometimes I just tether to my phone and let it upload overnight.

Honestly, I feel this one in my soul. I've definitely done the surface mount thing and then had a customer look at it like I just ran exposed wiring through their living room on a dare from a coworker. It's always a gamble between saving time and not having them call you back asking if you can "just tuck it behind the wall real quick." My rule of thumb is if it's a rental or a basement, surface mount all day; but in a finished living room, I'll spend the extra hour fishing wire just so I don't have to hear about it from their spouse later. Tbh, my back already regrets every hole I've drilled, but my pride hates exposed conduit more.