Yes, although he was traveling so he wasn't able to recover until he returned home and even then, there was a gap in his backup (his fault) and his screenshare recording wasn't backed up since it was done while traveling. Thankfully he had already sent his presentation ahead to the conference he was presenting at, so he was at least able to complete that obligation.

This is a good lesson for everyone... obviously we all know to backup regularly (let Time Machine do its thing multiple times per day of course); but the lesson for me was when traveling, have everything you need backed up on a USB stick at least.

Yeah, traveling would get you :( poor guy. Backblaze or something may have helped slightly with that (not the screenshare recording, if it was too big).

And yes, a high capacity USB stick. There are very small thumb drives that you can permanently leave in the USB-port of the laptop. Unfortunately I haven't found one like that with a USB-C connector.