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Excuse me while I throw up
Icebear
Registered Users Posts: 4,015 Major grins
I'm so scared, I'm quivering. I think LR3 just melted down on me. I'd just imported a couple dozen shots and was starting to triage them when I got a blue screen for a couple seconds, then a message that "Windows has encountered (BS, BS)" then the machine shut down. It restarted to a DOS screen with the usual choices. I chose "Restart Windows Normally" and things seemed to go fine . . . 'till LR restarted.
My Catalog now has a grand total of 40 photos in it. What happened to the 10s of thousands that WERE in my LR3 Catalog?? I had LR3 set to back up the catalog EVERY time I closed LR unless I chose to "skip this time." My backup catalog was on an external HD. Guess what? IT'S NOT THERE. Nothing.
I am at a complete loss. I use the Windows 7 backup system, and supposedly my whole system and all my files are backed up, but I can't actually look at the files in that folder (also on an external HD) without restoring my whole damned system.
Does anyone have any ideas?
My Catalog now has a grand total of 40 photos in it. What happened to the 10s of thousands that WERE in my LR3 Catalog?? I had LR3 set to back up the catalog EVERY time I closed LR unless I chose to "skip this time." My backup catalog was on an external HD. Guess what? IT'S NOT THERE. Nothing.
I am at a complete loss. I use the Windows 7 backup system, and supposedly my whole system and all my files are backed up, but I can't actually look at the files in that folder (also on an external HD) without restoring my whole damned system.
Does anyone have any ideas?
John :
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
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Moderator of the Cameras and Accessories forums
I should have one from about midnight last night. I've never done that before, and am scared to death to try it. Just to make sure I understand, is that something that I'd have if I was using Windows 7 Backup?
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
Start button - Help and Support
Where it says "Search Help", click and type "restore point" (without the quotes)
Click on #4 - "Restore system files and settings"
Click on #1 - "Click to open System Restore"
Check to see if you have a recent restore point (nothing happens until you cause it to happen)
Optionally you can also create a new restore point (so you can come back to this point) , but I would just try the most recent restore point. The restore point will not (generally) restore user files, so if something stomped on them, you might still have to use your backup.
If the restoration does not work or is not available, contact Adobe again for more recommendations.
Moderator of the Cameras and Accessories forums
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
LR does not overwrite a backup file once it writes it.
If you look in Edit->Catalog settings you and the location says something like
c:\users\foo\Lightroom
then the backup directories that contain the .lrcat files will be in the directory.
c:\users\foo\Lightroom\backups
Is that directory empty?
The images are not in the catalog, only the metadata, like how many stars an image has, is. Images are saved where you picked when you did the import. Are the images still on the disk?
http://www.danalphotos.com
http://www.pluralsight.com
http://twitter.com/d114
Restore a backup catalog
- Choose File > Open Catalog.
- Navigate to the location of your backed up catalog file.
- Select the backed up .lrcat file and click Open.
- (Optional) Copy the backed up catalog to the location of the original catalog to replace it.
Pfffttt . . . it ain't there. Nada.[/COLOR]Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
There a chance the backup catalog files are on the disk, but the blocks that make them accessable are corrupted. A disk data recovery service *might* be able to restore them. http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/ has been doing recovery a long time but is you search for disk recovery you will find a bunch of them.
Best of luck...
Dan
http://www.danalphotos.com
http://www.pluralsight.com
http://twitter.com/d114
I'm going form memory (which is dangerous at my age) as i'm not on my home PC but assuming external drive is connected an working, a couple of thoughts:
- search all drives for the file .lrcat extension
- search for a directory called 'backups'
- check trash
- you said you have a win 7 backup, you may be able review the individual files by 1) go to control panel, 2) go to system and maintenance 3) then backup and restore (actual steps may be different depending on your control panel view) select either restore my file or restore all users files (preferred) then then browse for the files. One danger may be that the back up was not configured to backup your external drive unless you told it to do that.
I hope the issue is the files got inadvertently moved and you are able to locate them and get your stuff back.
Best of luck!
I won't bore y'all with all the details. I will thank everyone for trying.
Suffice it to say that I continue to be baffled. I've simply rolled over and re-imported all the files into LR3, at their current locations. No problem with that. The problem is that all my keywords are gone, all my edits are gone (unless I'd created a .tiff or .jpg, in which case the keywords are still in the file) my collections are history, my flags and ratings . . . you get the picture.
Here are the lessons I have learned from this fiasco (YMMV)
1. Windows 7 Backup sux. I tried my darndest to find and restore ONLY the Lightroom Folder that should have been in Pictures, but apparently the only way to restore a folder is to restore everything. Screw that. I'm getting some better back-up software.
2. LR3's Backup Catalog "utility" is not something I will ever trust again. From now on, I'm manually copying the Lightroom Folder from Pictures onto a removeable drive. And yes, I DID have it set to backup to an external drive already.
3. I'm exporting a JPG of every "Pick" I edit, and saving the whole pile of JPGs on another external drive with similar file organization to my raw (Lightroom) files so I don't have to re-edit thousands of raw files if this ever happens again.
I'm exhausted. Thank you again for your advice. I followed it the best I could, but whatever gremlin did me in was thorough as hell.
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
no condescending attitudes or nothing...just really helpful......I did have to sorta explain my problem but then
i am not the most articulate at times...especially when frustrated.........but the members held my hand and
walked me thru the prob.
Here is the link: http://tinyurl.com/ykbfnka ......and you'll have to set up an account if you do not already have one......
Good Luck
Patience is NOT one of my primary strengths.
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
4. Go to your catalog settings and in the Metadata tab check the "Automatically write changes into XMP" box. That will cause every edit you do to be written to an XMP sidecar file. You can also write those files manually by selecting a file(s) and hitting Ctrl+S
5. Go to backblaze.com and get yourself an online backup plan. $5 a month for a fully automatic backup in a far away location that can't be touched by a rogue application/computer crash/natural disaster.
Thanks for the additions Rob!
Re 4: That explains why the tiffs and jpgs kept their keywords, but the NEFs did not. Any feel for how much writing all those XMP sidecars slows down the processing in LR3? I think I considered doing that a few years ago when I started with LR1, but decided against it for reasons of processing speed. Live and learn, eh?
Re 5: I've been hesitant to set up an on-line backup 'till I resolve my Verizon Fios reliability issues. Damn thing goes out on me a couple times a day. The initial backup would probably take a solid week and I was worried Verizon would screw it up.. I may give it a go anyway.
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
Backblaze is pretty smart about backing up, checking backup integrity, etc. etc. even with flaky connections. I agree that your initial backup would take longer if your connection flakes out but I wouldn't worry about the integrity of the backup. Backblaze also does some versioning à la Time Machine, so you can get files back that were backed up within the last 30 days or so.
My friends' home office was recently robbed (along with the rest of their house) and the robbers took all of their computers, hard drives, etc. Luckily they had backed everything up to Backblaze. They ordered new hard drives with their backups on them, and in a couple of days, they were back up and running with new computers and all of their backed up data.
I can't recommend Backblaze highly enough. They rock!
On their website, I detect some "animosity" between them and ESET, my AV software (NOD32). Makes me a little nervous. Sounds like mutual finger pointing and "stupid-calling." They certainly do seem smarter, more transparent and less condescending than either Mozy or Carbonite.
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
I believe that CrashPlan lets you "jumpstart" your backup by mailing them a USB drive that they then copy the contents of to their servers. From there, it's incremental backup. Backblaze's initial (full) backup can take a while.
Cool! I can mail them an 8Gig thumbdrive to jumpstart my 100 Gig backup. Groan. Shoulda done this years ago.
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
I don't notice any slowdown at all. It's writing out a separate small file for each change, which is pretty insignificant. In fact, I just copied off 6000 of them to my backup drive and it was only about 50MB total. I just realized you may have been asking about reading from all those files, but I don't think LR does that (except on a new import). It's more like a per photo copy of what's in the catalog, so it never needs to recheck the xmp.
My initial backup on backblaze took over a month. My pathetic connection at the time would only upload about 2GB/day. It just keeps plugging away for as long as it takes, so best to start sooner rather than later. I've now got about 250GB backed up with them. I haven't tried the others, so no clue how they compare, but whichever one you go with, the price is well worth the peace of mind!
I'm pretty sure LR still uses it's own database and the XMP files are redundant.
Lots for me to think about, but it seems obvious to me that what I want to end up with is:
A. XMP sidecar files (already done)
B. Offsite backup
C. Local (Mirrored) backup
Now to settle on a plan. Thank you everybody. Ziggy, Art, Rob, Dan, Bitwise95, "Aquaman." Call me "sadder but wiser."
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
Also, you could restore your W7 backup to another system and pull the needed file(s) out that way. It's definitely a pain, but might be worth a try if the data is important enough. I use Acronis to backup my systems, which is a much more robust backup than the built-in W7 option. Of course, there are many, many imaging solutions out there to choose from, but I can recommend Acronis from using it about eight years.
.02
Hey Gecko,
Yes, I actually did find the Previous Versions, and the latest Previous Version of the lrcat file was in early June, even though the latest backup had been done on 8/17. I know none of this makes sense. It just seems impossible for it to have gone down the way it apparently did. I finally just gave up and re-imported, and then went through and deleted all previous lrcat files in case there was some sort of corruption in them that was causing the malfunctions. So I think I've burned my bridges.
I've also just started a trial subscription to Backblaze. Wonder how long it will take to upload 175 Gigs?
Thanks for the re-direct to Acronis. I'm not familiar with them. Can you expand on what you like about them? I'm not very "techie."
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
I use Carbonite, and it works very well with ESET Smart Security. I'm not sure what you mean by transparent. I can see exactly what I've backed up, what I've not, etc..
Good luck!
Acronis makes software (like Norton Ghost) to create full images of your system.
I was referring to the website. It seems a bit less dumbed-down and polished. Mozy and Carbonite are slick sites without much detailed content. Backblaze's site has (IMO) more actual information, more and better FAQs, etc.
For ex: how else would I have kown about the conflict with ESET? You can look at that as a good and/or bad thing. Bad, because the conflict exists, but good, because they tell you, right there in their website, how to step around it by using the advanced settings IN ESET!
They just give you a lot more info on the website, which I appreciate. I would imagine the products are quite similar. I've hears folks say that one or the other was faster, but I have my doubts. I'd bet your connection speed is 99% of the equation, and neither Mozy, Carbonite, nor Backblaze can do much about that.
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
FYI, I think you can mail them a USB hard drive with your entire backup on it, so if it's 100GB, you would mail them a drive with 100GB worth of data on it. Above, you said you would be uploading 175GB of stuff, so in that case you would buy a drive that is large enough to hold all of your stuff and just mail that to them.
FWIW.
Total bummer on the catalog loss. I'd love to know what caused it (but then again, I know you'd like to know the same thing).
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
I appreciate all the help I've been offered in this thread, but I have to say Rob's suggestion, to have LR write all the metadata to an XMP sidecar is (for me anyway) going to be the most valuable. See, even if the LR catalog had gotten corrupted and I didn't even HAVE a backup, I could have just reimported everything, and all the edits and keywords would have come right on back. Still would have lost my collections, etc, but I'd have been way ahead of where I am now.
Have I said THANK YOU to everybody yet???
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
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I'm no longer trying to figure it out. Just gettin' on with life.
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.
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Loud and clear!
And when my off-site back-up upload finishes in a week or so, I'm going to mirror my two main drives onto a portable that will stay disconnected unless I'm updating it!
I didn't used to be paranoid 'till I found out they really WERE out to get me.
Natural selection is responsible for every living thing that exists.
D3s, D500, D5300, and way more glass than the wife knows about.