Been a long week.

First time I've picked up my camera for 6 days.

As well as all the worry over mum, the near-miss on the motorway, I have also lost my current working hard drive with 2.5TByte of photos on it. 

Thankfully, most of the originals with the exception of around 2,000 images are backed up to my NAS drive. Hadn't done a backup for about 10 days and missed a few days earlier in the year. Need to fix my workflow.

The failed drive is down to a data error in the system file structure. Foolishly, I had followed Apples recommendation when I bought it and installed a single APFS system with two containers - one for my data and the other for the Time Machine backup. The latter seems to be mandatory but I now realised I could have used an older partition type to store my own data.

It seems that APFS is both prone to this kind of data corruption and, more worryingly, there are no tools that allow data recovery (unless you pay megabucks). Apple's Disk Utility simply does nothing to fix the problem. 

I was using a WD external HD that replaced a failed LaCie drive which was replaced under warranty. Am now using that replacement.
I need a more performant NAS solution that supports editing directly from there rather than what seem to be increasingly flaky USB HDs. That NAS solution is about £1,200+. Ouch.