I do have some files missing after The Great Deletion Event (paleo nerds I know you get this reference.) I had collected research on both the TV and stage adaptations of The Mirror and the Light. I know people know I probably have Opinions on the depiction of Anna. I do also hope people know that includes my appreciation of the pull between narrative and reality. But yes, you cannot dedicate a good part of two decades of Anna and all the depictions of her to not spot influence. One line of research has been to track prints of her because for most of art/costume history she wasn’t visible.

The written word is how most people got introduced to her so I have also got a few strand of research going back that way as well.

FWIW I’m also working my way through costume history books I only ever used for images and… ouch. Oh no. Just. One example is carelessness in the print production- the portraits of Anna and Jane Seymour got the other’s caption.

But yes I can tell when my own research makes it to research/recreation and I just wish people would cite me. I share because when I started out everyone was discouraged from recreating the Holbein portrait. The argument was that there were not enough similar examples. Thus my timeline of portraits. Thus my collection of every catalogue possible.

I have finally emerged somewhat victorious from my other SSD and my folders of my costumes. To say it was with a mix of overwhelming emotions is to put it mildly. I have so much to be proud of. This was also in part so that I can get my patterning book organised.

What is extremely clear is that I sneak in every possible accurate patterning and construction element in my cosplay. Like. That makes it super difficult to draw the line between the too. Take my Lizzy gown. Obviously Lizzy but I used Kohler and so have an accurate back panel- the miniseries really stuck to modern princess curves.

My Blue Dress from Phantom. Not silk like the original but cotton and I used yes actual 1870s-80s patterning and construction.

I’m super tired though.

Not very well. What I had dismissed as a tummy bug on my birthday has actually not gone away. And has gotten so much worse. It’s caused me to be extremely tired and I can’t leave the house. The problem is I can’t tell what’s going on. To go with it I’ve developed trigger finger in both hand.

I had also dismissed that as my fault for throwing good health after bad in preserving my data. But. It’s exactly the same pattern in both hands which just screams RA. If it was over use then the knots around my tendons would map more to the mouse buttons. Instead the worst is middle finger on each side with knots I can feel easily, then ring fingers with smaller less intrusive ones, then the tendons in my index fingers feel more like they are barely passing through, and my little fingers feel more like they are drifting and it is just all in all extremely limiting.

So I’ve got a short taper of prednisone to calm down inflammation, as a break. At this point though there’ll be secondary problems which are a bit more difficult to resolve because it’s not just a case of taking probiotics but which ones. And that’s made even more complicated being on immunosuppressive therapy as they’re all live organism so could get out of control.

I’m hoping this does indeed “just” mean a change in diet daily probiotics, but I know my RA/immune side effects. I have a pattern of developing symptoms that bed in and hang around for more than 18 months. I even have a couple of nodules on a knuckle- mine tend to stay small but spread and they’ve moved apart fairly quickly. These are essentially the same process as what happens inside the joint.

On a nicer note, Missy has managed to wiggle her way to my bed and has slept on me two nights in a row. It’s a bit difficult because of course both Boo and Mr Carlo loved my room but especially when they weren’t well.

It is easing tensions between Missy and Fluffy, so I’m hoping Fluffy settles even more.

Our Very Good Papa blackbird is missed, but he taught his children well and while we won’t be sure which is which we do know he does live on that way. His wing injury just made it so easy to recognise him which is how we knew he had lived a good long life, but it’s also how we became attached by recognising him every day.

This whole issue was indeed the update- which means I really was risking all of my work and that I couldn’t use my laptop instead. I’m clearly a bit biased here in feeling a certain way about how all of this has played out so I might be reading a bit more into this but one of the vendors updated their article:

This update may introduce system-wide issues that affect VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) operations, leading to backup failures… In some cases, the affected machine may also lose connectivity with the cloud console and appear offline… After extensive troubleshooting and verification of all available mitigation steps, the issue has been escalated… As a resolution please install the [OS] update released on 12 May 2026.

So here we find it was system wide, included their cloud services, and they could do nothing. But what of the other vendors? Well. No one is really saying very much about the how and why, some are even using it to promote their product. Nothing like a little exploitation in the morning. But I did find one of my cloud services was affected. Oh no. Do I need to look at the other? Okay, let’s write that down on a long list of software to check.

Right now I seem to have lost the thread as to what backups I was originally working from. So that’s not fun. It’s a lot of work. Files are safe, I just am back to trying to find them. “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Well. So. Guess what? Yet another back up app failing and again by the manufacturer of the drive affected. Running in the background too. And with an associated driver that appeared as a stand alone device in device manager, and in storage devices.

My internal HDD seemed fine, but attaching my brand new external? It kept appearing and disappearing in disk and device management- flashing really. Read and write errors of a kind that suggested massive hardware fail. I tried different cords, different ports, but nothing. It was so bad that I thought it was bricked.

But no. I ran chkdsk on it and oh what was that? “A snapshot error occurred while scanning this drive. You can try again, but if this problem persists, run an offline scan and fix.” So I uninstalled the software and lo. My drive is perfectly fine.

It would be a miracle if my Ironwolf is okay. What happened there was probably hardware- power management issue which is possibly related. But based on how the external flashed on and off, and the kinds of errors thrown- it is possible. I’ll have to try with the enclosure.

Okay. So. Do I test my Ironwolf. Okay. No. Definitely hardware failure. A pity. It’s not spinning up in the enclosure- probably not enough power- when attached by sata the clicks and interesting new beep suggests the only chance of recovery is gong to be complex. And no. I’m not sending it off for recovery given all the sensitive information on it.

Now the question remains- when will it be safe to actually *do* anything?

I’m in so much pain. I am the bendiest of bendy banana shapes over my keyboard.

And yes, so much noise still.

It’s emerging that the April update does in fact interfere with backups. Technically I shouldn’t be affected- at all. I don’t have the driver. But other back up software that also do not use this driver are also affected affected- VSS errors. The named software has a secure, but paid for update, another says they can’t do anything as they are simply using OS functions, and the third which is bundled with a brand of drives is looking into it. So no this has no easy resolution. None named so far were on my system during The Great Deletion. But I did have one- not so coincidentally I feel- for the drive actually wiped. There is no such software for the two drives where everything wound up in the bin and so was recoverable. So I still think that’s a clue.

And this is why this update is so nasty. After the August update that caused SSDs to be erased- again there was a single vendor recognised but more people seemed affected- everyone recommended the data management software at the very heart of this issue, for being so reliable.

For me? Removing the migration software has had the obvious effect of preventing these errors. Wow. Shadow copies abound today. Did the migration software get triggered in a way it caused the partition to be wiped? It does perform such a clean on the target- I mean.. yes obviously. But why did manually copying files trigger this.

I’m unwilling to lose data. Oh I should also add there seems to be.. something.. related to cloud services being affected. I’ve been getting errors for one- and it’s not supposed to happen because this is not an enterprise version and there should not be settings that are there. Either that or event viewer is inaccurate.

All of this while there is heavy, heavy, heavy, machinery clearing the section next door still. It’s just not conducive to doing anything. It’s just not possible to concentrate. So I’ve mostly just been looking in event viewer, reliability monitor, task scheduler- because yay for third party apps setting trigger events there that override my start up wishes. And trying to be prepared for patch Tuesday- which is a day later.

Oh. Somehow an image I edited on my laptop that disappeared- it alerted me to cloud syncing weirdness- has reappeared but only last night. The OOB update was only a few days later and so even with a slow rollout it doesn’t seem related.

I can barely stop from crying because this is such a waste of my life. And my RA anniversary is a big one, one that really strikes home how much of my life has been wasted in flares, how much I’ve had to give up. And my digital record at least preserves something. So please, no unhelpful advice- I have owned my own computer since 2003. Just the update catalogs themselves reveal how much goes wrong even when it’s not all users all the time. I have back ups of back ups of back ups- that’s not the problem. The problem is these were being erased by backing them up. I’m not risking anything when there still isn’t a clear solution.

The two weeks of digger hell is really affecting stress, but it also making me physically ill. The nausea is so bad.

Oh yes- stability of my computers the answers are coming in slowly as more people ask for help, I worry the next update will be worse- so I’m using this dinky drive that is rock solid even though it’s probably more than a decade old. Most of my drives prior to 2021 are actually, they really are. But the demolition of next door began suddenly and *right now* of all times so that the noise and vibration and shaking of the house for more than a week left me just staring at my drives yesterday and couldn’t remember what was on what. You have no idea how many times I’ve tried to write this single paragraph. But the process to denude the property of all plant life means chainsawing through at least one trunk more than a meter wide, use of a digger to drag said trunk around, digger used to scrape smaller vegetation, and the chipping machine on for hours at a time. Oh and that trunk? From a probably 9m palm that was felled in one go. Yes they got the angle right but bloody hell it was tall enough to land on me at my desk, or in bed, or the garage.

However. I have said before that having fibro is like being next to a demolition and yeah it is. Sure technically you’re not in direct pain from the noise and vibrations and swaying, but it’s constant. It’s relentless. You find other senses starting to kick up a fuss like light.

High-intensity noise exposure activates the sympathetic nervous system and impairs work performance by reducing processing speed while maintaining accuracy. These findings underscore the importance of considering noise not only as an auditory hazard but also as a factor affecting cognitive ergonomics and occupational performance.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12456168/

And more generally:

The combined biochemical and structural evaluation of alterations associated with chronic noise exposure provides important insights into the mechanisms by which this often underestimated environmental stressor contributes to physiological damage. These findings underscore the critical need for effective noise mitigation strategies to protect both mental and physical health. Detailed knowledge of the biological pathways and cellular changes implicated in the pathology of chronic loud noise action could pave the way to further translational research.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/bmri/2680036

So, yes, lots to unpack there. But I really can’t focus. At all. And I hurt. Sound doesn’t just funnel into our ears, the waves hit us bodily. And what do you know. I find I tense my body up both with this and with fibro. It can be a sneaky way my fibro gets to the shouting level too.

Anyway. Back to the drives- one did seem to move my files to the bin again, I wish I’d grabbed the timestamps for them because the first time they all had the same stamp. If there were a few minutes between each that would be me. There should be a journal of that yes?

Not that I want to connect any drive at all. Even if the issue is apparently triggered by heavy writing. which. Apparently is defined as 50G or more. Which. What? That will include more than the size of the files themselves but everything that’s written in order to copy/transfer.

So imagine what backing up or reorganising my 3T of mostly research counts as? Apparently I’m not supposed to use my PC like that. Even though this is a custom build for gaming.

So I keep looking up possible firmware updates or conflicts.

The hard drive does seem to be stuck. And worse- if I have it connected with my OS drive? Both my OS and *BIOS* stall. So there is something very badly wrong. For a drive a year old? Okay. So I have the original drives and files I was organising and as much of a mess as it is- the files are intact. Except?

Now the 1TSSD I was working on got wiped. Wiped. No files in the recycle bin or anything. It shouldn’t happen but the big clue is that nothing wound up in the recycle bin and the drive is apparently ready to be a back up again. Lol to the no.

Okay so let’s try again, I attach my 1T external SSD and.

Files erased. Space indicated it was empty.

However, heavenly choir, they were at least in the recycle bin. Neither my recovery apps nor windows could restore them- they just appeared super confused. I had accidentally left that drive as exfat so I think I actually got lucky there. Exfat has no journaling so maybe it confused whatever the heck was going on? I do wonder if it’s related to drivers stored for all drives I’ve attached over the years.

But I can’t trust my laptop either. I took some screenshots of a video to share a new annoying feature on youtube. I chose save as and… both the screen shot and copy vanished. That’s my cloud drive. I tried just cropping a second one. Also disappeared.

Oh but it gets even better. I just started moving cloud to cloud at my PC and a folder full of *photos* had clearly been wiped. The folder structure is there. And I just checked- yes. Storage settings were changed so I think those files got deleted because I hadn’t looked at them in *checks notes* 60 days.

What? Just, what? Yes, because we never need to store our digital life for more than 60 days.

I’ve looked through all the files included in the latest update and there are many that could impact both the HDD (power settings) and my drives (storage settings.) Obviously these were all part of the OS, not something totally new. But I think the settings changed on me. I spotted some that I knew immediately.

So. That’s great. That’s just. Dandy.

I have no idea what in tech the default is irreversible destruction when both individuals and businesses need their data backed up permanently.

The update for sure is responsible for changing settings so I’m hanging out in support fora looking for any clue that this is on the cards for a patch. But I did also find this has been an issue in previous updates- specifically erasing SSDs. Pretty shocking. And that was just August *last year.*

The latest OS update fried my HDD- or rather a little background update it needed. I found the changelog and all files, and I used event viewer and device manager and it all points to power settings- oh and it lost the driver for the PCI controller. The specific change I noticed was a bit weird. On my laptop the changes were more annoying than catastrophic- the app window for the cloud sits underneath the taskbar.

But the power settings for the HDD gets complicated, the noise it makes now trying to spin up could be head parking. And that does seem to be triggered by the wrong power settings especially sleep. And it looks like it’s bad to have them spin down for this exact reason. And yes, turns out my OS did indeed do this.

You know it’s kind of bad when you read these drives aggressively manage power.

I tried a system restore as well and. Well the system completely broke. So I’m using my itty bitty 250G drive to go through my backups. I did make them. They’re just very messy.

I’m pretty shattered by all of this. I have all the updates files but I had finally worked out how to use the Melvil system on my files. I had a little mope wrapped up in the pink and yellow throws Sweet Boo and Little Dude loved, so that helped me draw a line under this.

But, yes, I needed an actual library system that’s how extensive it is. However. All of that work is in my noodle even if I feel like Brutha after memorising the entire library of Ephebe- I keep expecting the Librarian to reach through L-SPace to pat me on the hand, offer me a banana, and ook gently in empathy.