Damn I'm sorry. I had a similar problem with a hard drive failure a few years ago. Lost a lot of photos. We still have moments of discovery when we find a favorite photo that someone printed out or that was posted to social media. But so many are just gone. Took me a long time to get over it. By the way for quotes, I prefer never try to teach a pig to sing...
Thanks for your support @steven-patrick.
I suppose we all have similar stories in one form or another.
I've already started to long road of downloading from Google, editing and reorganising. I need to make an effort to find one of my external hard drives that's missing, to see if my art photographs is on it.
I'd rather find out now that they are gone than in a few weeks time, and get upset all over again.