Turns out I managed to buy one of the now know bad hardrives (c2021 through 2023) from a brand that used to be really reliable. If I’m very lucky it’s not physical bad sectors (well there will be some) but logical caused by the firmware it was shipped with, and which has been updated since, which means I could potentially erase, reformat and reinstall.

Having backed up folder by folder over three days I found around 50 genuinely affected files and they all seem to be photos in my 2014-2018 folders. And they seem to be good on my earlier backup drives.

That timeframe though means I might have lost photos of Boo and of Carlo and of Fluffy.

That I seem to have safe back ups on three internal and three external drives means I’m in a much better position. But I will need to buy a new (smaller) boot drive so that I can just experiment with the flawed drive.

But this is eating to my grieving time, and my research time. Sorry that choices in how photos are transferred, modified, and saved changed was your choice OS but now have to move thousands of images into a more reliable year> month folder hierarchy. It’s also not my fault you can’t preserve daylight savings and indeed UTC settings so that I’m never sure if the newer or older date is accurate.

It turns out my OS and SSDs are not meant for researchers. I’m apparently acting far more like a data centre than home user. My pc build though was for gaming so I’ve been really protected for a long time though. Such a good build. The motherboard hates one brand though which is why I switched in the first place.