RE: My worst nightmare.... Are my photos all gone?
Oh.. I usually keep different copies of my files: All new files stay on my internal hard drive at least until I have backed them up to the cloud (Amazon Photos offers unlimited free Raw storage for prime customers), a copy of all photos goes to my external HDD and I have 4SD cards with a total of 128gb that last me for some weeks without overwriting. At home I make a copy to a second hard drive. Despite that, I had data loss once when my laptop broke, my HDD stopped working, the SD card was corrupted and I didn't have fast internet to make a full cloud backup! Luckily I was able to restore some data from the SD card at first and when I got home from my trip I was actually able to fix the HDD - for some reason it made any windows computer freeze when plugged in but was still accessible from Unix systems.