Vice grips on a rubber brake line is a gamble I would NOT take, man. That fluid is under serious pressure and if that clamp slips even a little you got nothing left, especially with semis around. The front brakes alone can stop you okay in the dry, but what if it rains or a tire blows out at 45? I carry extra line and a flare kit instead, plus a couple of pre-made short lines with fittings already on them. Takes ten minutes to swap a section on the shoulder versus trusting a pair of pliers to hold your life together. Also those vice grips can crush the line so bad that even after you get home, that section is done, so you're replacing more than just the original break. Glad you made it, but I would fix that properly before you drive it again.

Wait, does anyone else here just mentally block out the month they spent rebuilding a half-corrupted file tree from tapes? Because that was me back in 2017, not a coolant leak but a contractor who "accidentally" ran a disk-wiping script on our live backup NAS. I remember standing in the closet-sized server room at 6 AM, holding a coffee that was mostly sweat, and realizing the last good full backup was from eleven days prior. That's when I started doing what you do, but with a twist: I actually restore to a throwaway VM and open random files to make sure they're not just empty shells. It takes twice as long, but it caught a silent corruption bug that would've bricked our entire archive last year. So yeah, your 90-day rule is smart, but if you wanna feel real pain, try recovering 40k photos from a tape drive that smells like burnt toast and hope the catalog file isn't lying to you.