Iām just seeing this. Yikes!! 
ā¦ and you canāt recover them!
This is why I backup and disconnect peripherals before updating. Twice Apple has issued updates that wiped attached external storage drives (I wasnāt a victim because I disconnect.)
2 years of photos and no backup?
Keep this in mind. Cloud storage can vanish on a momentās notice. If your singular Cloud storage went away today for some reason, where is all your stuff?
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Iāve always had that in the back of my head. I donāt trust āthe cloudā much more than I trust anything these days lol 
And here I thought I was a luddite because my daily backups and long-term archives are all done locally.
I am exactly the same. You only learn the true importance of back-ups after the worst has happened. Thankfully, for me, it happened early on and nothing too major was lost (I managed to retrieve most of it from a failed disc). It was enough to scare the bejesus out of me.
Now I am bordering on obsessive. Hourly/daily back-ups to time machine, then everything important; client projects (as soon as they are completed), photos, business admin, etc, etc, gets archived to a raid drive, so thereās always two mirrored copies and then just in case, that is all then tripled up in to another external usb drive.
Paranoid? Who, me?
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At work, we have cloud, RAID in the office somewhere, and an offsite RAID as well.
You know whatās interesting about RAID drives? Yeah, sure you can swap out a failed drive with, theoretically, no loss (Iāve lost stuff) but if the CASE goes, weāve found that you canāt just stack the drives into a new case. It has to be the exact same model case that they came out of. So we keep a spare. Use the drives if needed, and have the case, just in case.