The short version is: The Dread Microsoft Update (Beware the Ides of May!!) murdered my OS slooowly. So slowly, in fact, that my broken OS had time to break most of my fancy full-system data backups, on both of my external harddrives!

Oh no, that sounds horrible. What went wrong?! Windows is so very UGH.

Does anyone else do that, or is it just me?

Lots of people seem to? I don't, personally, but I hear it all the time.