Saved by my Air Gapped Archive

I had a perfect storm of issues over the past week. I had the April Update of windows 10 forced on my computer and in the process the Homegroup networking just disappeared along with some of the network drive letter I used to share folders across my local area network. Also the NBN line to the internet (and my phones) dropped out and took many mobile phone calls to report and get re-established. NBN is not a popular word around here. When the internet was back the modem and router began playing up, WiFi dropping out and weird things happened across my network, including my Netgear Stora NAS (Network Attached Storage) which I use for backup/disk mirroring went silent and these was the pain of another few days of reporting problems. Long hours of automated phne system and support calls and just general frustration.  Then horror I noticed all my photos from 2017 & 2014 and most of my 2018 photos had disappeared off my network. Worse my two external portable hard drives, also seem to have lost the same folders. It all happened so fast I knew it could not possible be an accidental deletion and the two external hard drives where not connected to anything at the time. So how could they possibly have lost the data. Time to panic?
It could have been BUT last year I had set up an “Air Gapped” Archive, on a Linux computer that was not attached to the internet (or my Local area network). My original plan was to rotate these on a three generation Son-Father- Grandfather cycle and store the grandfather off-site. However as I have only been updating the cycle every-six months (my original plan was every three months)using old computer hard drives. I only have two generations and they are both here. So I broke out the father copy and fired up my little Linux machine. It took a while but what a relief all the missing directories and photos where there. Next the son copy, all there as well, actually only up to mid December last year when I did the last archive backup. So I could be missing a few months, bummer! I unplug my archive drive and went and got one of my external backup drive, the one I knew I had used most recently, to my surprise all the missing folders where there and full of my recent photos.
In disbelief I unplugged it (after a safe to remove step) and took it back to my desktop, no folders again. What is going on? I took the external drive to my laptop also connected to my LAN, the missing folders and photos could not be found. Back to my linux machine and they are there! What a mystery?
Actually I wasn’t so surprised I felt strongly that it was impossible that so many files on different media and places would instantly disappear. However at the moment I don’t understand why this happened. I’m just very glad I put some time into planning an archive system (with backups of the archive).

If you haven’t already got a backup system in place for your growing photo collection go and do it now. Then before to long plan how best to archive the collection!