Water-damaged 2022 MacBook Air M2: file transfer?

It sounds like your M2 MacBook Air is too badly water-damaged to operate it normally – or to start it in Recovery mode and use "Share Disk".

You are not going to be able to pull the internal drive out, either. The flash chips are soldered in, and their contents are mostly or completely encrypted with keys held in the Secure Enclave in the M2 chip. Even if you could pull out the flash chips and put them into another device without destroying them, separating the flash chips from the M2's encryption keys would make the data stored in them look like so much hash.

Hopefully you were making routine backups of some sort. (Or had the option turned on to store your Desktop and Documents folders in iCloud Drive, in which case the iCloud copies might be OK even if the local ones were toast.)

corinnehj wrote:

Thank you for explaining in a way that a novice like myself can understand. When I set up my last MacBook, everything was set to backup to the iCloud, but I'm only seeing a small portion of what was there. I know it's not a storage allowance issue, so I'm at a loss.

Apple doesn't sell iCloud as providing backups for Macs – only as providing it for iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches that can run recent enough versions of iOS / iPadOS.

If you were using iCloud synchronization for things like photos (iCloud Photos) or files in iCloud Drive (including Desktop and Document files, if that option was turned on), then the iCloud copies might survive destruction of devices synchronized against iCloud. And in that sense, iCloud synchronization might act as a partial "backup" for data on your Mac.

However,

• iCloud does not "back up" every file on your Macintosh. Even if you are using iCloud Drive with Desktop and Documents in iCloud, and using iCloud Photos, you could have a lot of other data outside of the synchronized areas – data that was only local to your Mac.
• iCloud synchronization does not protect you against catastrophes such as accidentally deleting your files – or having them overwritten by ransomware if you ran a Trojan Horse application. That's because a change made anywhere gets synchronized everywhere – and iCloud doesn't keep a version history. If you want to be able to go back to previous versions, you might need to use Time Machine, and/or keep multiple backup drives which you update on a staggered schedule.

It is the lack of version history, and the fact that iCloud synchronization is not intended to cover every possible file that you could store locally, that causes people to say things like "iCloud cannot be used to back up a Mac."

corinnehj wrote:

2022 MacBook Air Apple M2 has water damage and the keyboard is unresponsive. The laptop will power on, but I can't sign in, and the computer begins to go on and off on its own. Is there any way to transfer my files to my new MacBook Air?

You can recover your backed up files to the new computer.

corinnehj wrote:

Thank you for explaining in a way that a novice like myself can understand. When I set up my last MacBook, everything was set to backup to the iCloud

Unless you were using a 3rd party backup app, that is not the case.

iCloud can not be used to back up a Mac.

You can sync data to iCloud, including photos, desktop and documents, etc. but that is NOT a backup.

corinnehj wrote:

t I'm only seeing a small portion of what was there.

Could you elaborate on that?

Is this what you were doing?

Add your Desktop and Documents files to iCloud Drive - Apple Support

If so, what happens when you try to use the instructions for Find Your Desktop and Documents Files?