So the moral of the story is get a backup drive. Period.
After realizing that all the photos were missing I got a free undelete program (undelete plus for those interested) and used it to recover a goodly part of my photos. Even so, I still lost about a two month chunk of photos and those that were recovered, well, some of them were corrupted (read: damaged beyond repair). So after that I re-organized photos into my library, and then realized that for some odd reason a lot of image files had had there name slightly modified, so instead of reading “IMG_xyzw.CR2″ they were something like “_MG_xyzw.CR2″ for no apparent reason. Then came the part where I discovered the wonderful usefulness of automater on the Mac. For those of you non Mac users, or those who have not used the program allow me to enlighten you: Automater allows you to take basic tasks for different programs (such as finding files, renaming, saving, moving, playing songs, etc) and put them into a workflow that will automatically execute. This allowed me to search for files beginning with “_MG” which built a list of files and then allowed me to do a rename on them that would replace “_MG” with “IMG” thus correcting the 2000 or so images that were randomly scattered throughout the recovered files saving me a huge amount of time and frustration should I have attempted it myself. That being done I was able to successfully import most of the files into Lightroom.
After a few hours I realized that lightroom keeps large preview files of images even when it cannot locate them, so, I started to try and figure out how I could export the preview files and discovered, several forum posts and failed attempts later, that the only real way to do it would be to go into the lightrooms cache file and manually dig them out… sorry… not quite happening at this point with my available time or technical understanding of the internal lightroom cache format.
So, once again, moral of the story: Get a hard drive and back EVERYTHING up BEFORE something like this happens ok? It’s much easier on the head and on your blood pressure.
Get the picture? … Good, till next time, with hopefully some real pictures,
Paul
