A belated dynnargh - welcome - to 2026.
I should have been here earlier. Alas, the past few weeks have been a tad stressful.
I had my last working day in my day job on 17 December. I had hoped to spend a large chunk of time editing around job-hunting, but there was some life admin and a couple of appointments to fit in before I headed south to Bromley for Christmas with the kittehs and the wee hamster.
Christmas was my usual (mostly) quiet affair, with the added pleasure of an early Christmas dinner with Sabine before she went north, and another on Christmas Eve with two good friends, Sophie and Dan (it would have been Christmas dinner, but the UK don't run public transport on Christmas Day and the pubs were closed, so we brought it forward).
I admit, I had a fairly lazy Christmas, as I was still mentally and emotionally exhausted from the past six months, but I was looking forward to returning home on 27 December to immerse myself in photo editing for my end-of-year wrap-up blog, which I was hopeful of sharing this year after having to forego it last year with my home move.
Unfortunately, my external Duo drive, containing (almost) all my life's work, had other ideas. I came downstairs on the day to pack up my laptop and the drive to travel home, and it was making some fatal clicking noises. Only a few folders from my primary drive (Daisy) appeared, but my Time Machine backups on Violet all seemed visible and accessible. However, after turning it off and back on again, neither my laptop nor my iMac was able to find the drives, except through the WD Discovery app. That showed the drives had a configuration fault.
Fast forward to yesterday, and I've provided a portable drive to a local(ish) company to copy the data they have recovered from Daisy, about 3 TB of what should be about 6. They haven't been able to access Violet to restore anything from her.
Fortuitously, I made a full backup to another drive (Orchid) in early April, when I had to reformat Daisy and Violet from MacOS Journaled to APFS. So, I have everything up to that date.
I haven't lost any raw or mobile photos as they were all imported to Photos on my iMac. I exported those not already on Orchid within a couple of days of returning home.
In addition, I had copied my client files and some day-to-day documents to my iCloud drive and a portable drive (Winnebago) that I usually take with me to Bromley. I copied the majority of files across in October and November, so they are relatively up to date.
It's unclear at this stage what the 3 TB recovered consists of, but I've resigned myself to the strong possibility that everything I have on Orchid and have retained on Winnebago and iCloud is all I will get back. The files seem almost unidentifiable from what the data recovery company has shown me. The task of reviewing them may not be as arduous as I first thought, as I'll likely sort by modified date and find there is little, if anything, created or edited since early April that I can recover.
So, while 2025 was a disappointing year from the perspective of how few photos I edited, it's somewhat positive when I consider the final edits I've likely lost. At a quick estimate, it's still about 50+ final edits, but not the hundreds to thousands I might have edited in previous years.
Dealing with that administrative nightmare (as well as formatting my replacement drive, sorting out some cloud storage, and trying to resolve the additional error Disk Warrior has started identifying with my iMac) will have to wait until next week.
Later today, I'll be heading down to Cornwall again with my friend and fellow photographer, Phil, to capture Looe (Shipton Abbott to fans of Beyond Paradise). And to revisit St Ives (where I took this photo on 1 March 2025) and Penzance.
I'm a little apprehensive, as we expect Storm Goretti to land in the area later today, and we're staying in an inn on the river. Fingers crossed the storm isn't as bad as forecast and/or it doesn't affect Looe too badly.
At least if confined to the inn, I have plenty of job-hunting and other things to be getting on with!
I hope 2026 is treating you kindly so far.