Now that I have enough hard drive space in my NAS (Network Attached Storage), I need to transfer the tens of thousands of photos I've collected from my hard disk photo archive to the NAS. That way I can access them anywhere at any time.

Problem is that I couldn't connect them together because I didn't have a cable to do it... despite having dozens of fucking cables piled up in my cupboard. My photo archive drive is Thunderbolt only. My NAS is USB-A only. Which means half of the problem is that support for Thunderbolt has been dropped. The other half is that USB ports keep changing. So even though I was dragging out various old drives to use as "hubs" in the hope that I could find a port/cable combination which would work, nothing ever did. After an hour I finally just gave up.

I finally had to borrow a drive enclosure from work so I could put my photo archive drives inside and get it hooked up to my NAS. I'll get on that tonight and see if everything will copy while I sleep.

At this point I should just come out and say it... the way USB keeps changing? It fucking sucks. There are a ridiculous number of USB port variations, and I have devices which use most of them. And why? Why are there so many?

JUST LOOK AT THIS SHIT...

And it doesn't stop there. All our prayers were supposed to be answered now that we've got USB-C... right?

Um, no. Turns out it's as bad as ever...

And so I guess I can just give up now.

Perhaps what I have to do is throw out absolutely everything everywhere that I own and start over. For every old drive I've got I buy a new drive, transfer the data over, then just burn all the old drives in a massive bonfire.

If anybody wants to give me the hundreds of dollars needed to make that happen...

UPDATE: And it didn't work. Apparently Wester Digital changed the proprietary RAID software they use between my older RAID enclosure and my work's newer RAID enclosure. The drives are incompatible. Instead I managed to find an old Thuderbolt-to-Ethernet dongle. Since my old laptop has two Thunderbolt ports and no ethernet port, that's what I had to use so that I could make the transfer via gigabyte ethernet from my Thunderbolt photo archive RAID to the NAS. Holy shit what a horrific mess.