www.ukbutterflies.co.uk

Thank you all for your concern - the problem is that I stupidly somehow managed to leave the thing on a train on the way home from London after my trip to York. I am hoping (unlikely though that probably is) that either TfL or Heathrow lost property will have found it. A lot of photos were on it from 2023 and 2024, but obviously a number of the better ones were posted here on UKB in my diary or in other threads, so are retrievable. There are also a few on iRecord, and one or two others I've emailed elsewhere that exist in my mailbox sent items folder.

The most annoying loss of butterfly photos is of those from the last few weeks which I hadn't got round to posting here yet. Also annoying is that the spreadsheet data for 2023 and 2024 that I keep of local sightings is lost too (though some of the info is in my PD on here). Everything up to December 2022 was backed up, I'm pleased to say.

Luckily, my youngest offspring produced a spare laptop from somewhere, reset it to its original state, and handed it over - once logged into my various accounts, magically all sorts of saved settings reappeared. However, the moral of the story is - back everything up all the time, and don't leave things on trains!

I went out locally this morning, found around 80 butterflies of 10 species, took a fair few photos and felt a bit less annoyed with myself...

Cheers,

Dave

Glad to hear you’re recovering everything, albeit gradually, Dave. Do let me know if it would help for me to download all your images (which will have been resized potentially) and send them to you … I can easily write some code to do this.

I had a PC die (hard disk drive failure) about a decade ago, which forced me to rethink my entire backup strategy. Everything is now backed up every hour to a second disk drive using Time Machine (I use Apple) and constantly to the cloud (using a combination of iCloud and Backblaze).

Cheers,

- Pete