Only after I am convinced that files are present and healthy do I invoke a synchronization action to update my backup drive.The reason for the latter is that Lightroom cannot make previews from present but damaged originals. Regularly check Lightroom for missing originals and for originals that are missing Previews. ![]() In case helpful, here are some tips to avoid a similar mess. E.g., at one point in the process it needed another 56 hours to complete step 2 of 3.Īfter approximately two months of near constant work I have recovered every single photograph. That process was slow but appeared to be working. I then tried to use the clone feature on Data Rescue 3 to make a copy of the damaged drive. And when I tunneled into the drive to see whether the original files were there, they were there - and undamaged. ![]() But for some reason it tricked the Finder into allowing the disk to be mounted. I know that’s delusional thinking, but I was desperate. Maybe, I hoped, the files were OK on the original drive and only became corrupted during the cloning process. I decided to buy Disk Warrior ($120), which many people said worked wonders on drives that Disk Utility couldn’t repair. The process of fixing the mess could easily take me thousands of hours, all unpleasant. I was seriously considering just aborting the entire process, or perhaps dedicating a third hard drive for housing the tens of thousands of unhomed, potentially damaged files that I’d recovered. And to my dismay, I soon realized that a large percentage of the files were damaged. This process took weeks and was extremely unpleasant. It worked, but the files had to be manually placed in the correct Lightroom folder and then rematched to the catalog. Data Rescue 3 to the rescue?īut because the working drive used to have those files, I hoped I might be able to get them back using Data Rescue 3, which I own. And because those missing originals were never uploaded to the cloud, I had truly just lost 30,000 photographs. My guess is that the original drive failed over a week or so, and SuperDuper! faithfully copied all the errors onto the backup drive. The Preview files were there, just no originals. After a bit of poking around I discovered that approximately 30,000 originals were missing. But this new drive was just fine, so I was perplexed. ![]() So I ordered a new backup drive and then continued the uploading to SmugMug, now even more convinced that I needed virtual copies of all my photographs.īut the uploading process still kept hanging, and I eventually discovered that the Publishing process was choking on missing files. Lightroom made this switch flawlessly - the number of photographs in my catalog was exactly the same as it was when using the dead drive. It was a slower, cheaper drive but it was a clone of other drive thanks to nightly updating I did with SuperDuper! software ($27.95). With the primary drive out of commission (oh, well, that happens) I simply pointed Lightroom to my backup photographs on the other 4T drive. The failed drive (bottom): G-Technology 4T USB 3.0 / FireWire 800. Failure of primary external hard driveĪt some point in this process the hard drive simply unmounted. The remaining photographs were large RAW files (50-60 MB each), so I wasn’t too alarmed by the glacial upload speeds and the frequent need to restart the publishing process. Days went by like this, and I was slowly getting my collection online, with perhaps 30,000 photographs to go. But that’s normal with Publishing actions so I’d just restart the publish process on the remaining, unpublished photographs in each album and walk away. I’d check back every few hours just in case Lightroom stopped uploading, which happened a lot. And while Lightroom hummed away I did yard work, cooked, and cleaned the chicken coop. So I would just set multiple years up on the Publish task and leave my computer to do its thing. ![]() The only pain was that the process of uploading each album (~5,000 pics each) can take days and ties up Lightroom. This is all very easy to set up and allows one-click syncing of physical and virtual copies. I have a SmugMug account with unlimited storage, so all I had to do was set up a Publish Service with yearly Smart Albums, then hit Publish. The disaster started in November when I decided to put my entire library online in case my external drives ever failed or were destroyed (say, in a fire).
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