Sadly, even given the precautions I take, it appears I’ve lost all of my photos between August 28th 2004 and August 9th, 2012.
It’s more than likely a combination of numerous moves and almost as many computer systems over the years, mixed with various online storage systems that came and went.
For example, I had several hundred photos hosted on my “iDisk” service at mac.com starting from 2008 or so, but that went away in June of 2012 and I clearly missed the window to download everything.
Oh well.
These days storage is so cheap that I have a dozen copies of things in half a dozen places, so it’s harder to loose it all.