Thanks for all replies.
Mr I42, I'm somewhat conservative when it comes to electronics, don't do anything out of the ordinary and make backups every week. The Apple system is perfect for such individuals like myself, it just works. Until it doesn't!
So, I needed to have a tech repair done on my iPhone and backed it up to my MacBook and thence to an external HD on Time Machine, as I do weekly. When the phone was returned, I hooked it up to the MacBook to upload my iPhone backup. Despite being visible in the storage, on Finder there was no backup.....So started my odyssey. The myriad of Genius' at two different stores, were bamboozled and despite resetting both phone and laptop many times, we got no further. Each time the Time Machine backups were used to reanimate the laptop, but no joy in getting the iPhone backup returned to my iPhone. This meant no numbers, no access to apps, no nothing.....On one of the last sessions with a Genius the external HD containing the several years of Time Machine backups was seemingly wiped, save for one from 9months ago. I was SO upset it was all I could do not to cry. A senior Genius managed to get me up and running with a 9mth old back up and 10% data iPhone.
There then followed maybe 10 more hours of phone based tech help which was escalated to up to Tier 2 Technicians and thence to programmers in Cupertino. Both my personal case Tech and I were optimistic about there being a patch or fix for the iPhone storage on the MacBook to be available to download to the iPhone. Alas, this was not possible as Apple don't offer this service due to their privacy policy. The MacBook stored iPhone files are corrupted and need to be fixed and the external HD with the missing Time Machine backups are also only recoverable by external software......I had thought that having 3 copies of my iPhone data was enough, that 2 copies of my MacBook data was enough, but alas it was not.
I have recently used the Apple iCloud service to back up my devices and any hesitations I had were overridden by my situation these last weeks. I'm leaning towards using the OnTrack recovery software as they claim it can repair corrupted files(mine were likely due to a power interruption) and also find and reanimate 'lost' files on external HD's. I'm hoping to do this in the next week or two when I have some quiet time. Hopefully my story is understandable and might well encourage anyone who doesn't have 3 distinct backups to reconsider.