Damage images??

[keiththom]

I've been using Lightroom for some 2 or 3 months now and I really like the program.

However, I had one folder of pictures that when I tried to open them, I couldn't because I got a message that they were damaged or corrupted. That was soon after I started using Lightroom.

Then today, I tried to open up one of my NEF pics in Lightroom and I got the following message:

" The file appears to be unsupported or damaged"

Some of the other tiff copies of the image were also damaged. I am trying to attach pics of some of them. Some of them are mixed with other pics.

I've never lost an image except one that was attached in some way to Lightroom and it makes me wonder if I need to keep separate copies of files that are not associated with Lightroom?

Any suggestions?

 

[Jimmsp]

I doubt this is a Lightroom problem; more likely a pc/hard drive problem.
What kind of pc do you have? Hard drive? How old?

If it were me, I'd copy the file from by backup drive back into this folder and try to reopen it.

 

[keiththom]

My laptop is a Toshiba Satellite S855. It's all greek to me but it has a AMD Quad-Core A10 accelerated Processor. 750 Gb HDD. 8 GB DDR3 Ram. AMD A10-4600M apu with Radeon (tm) HD Graphics. It is less than a year old.

My pictures are all stored on Western Digital external hard drives.

 

[clee01l]

At the very minimum, you should check your HDD for errors and repair.
http://www.thewindowsclub.com/disk-error-checking-windows-8

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2641432.

Lightroom is more sensitive to bad data than most other apps. All HDDs fail. Some sooner than others. One year and failure for the WD drives is not out of the range of normal. This is the primary reason to backup all of your critical data on a different HDD.

 

[keiththom]

I checked my computer hard drive for errors and it found none. I checked both my external hard drives and it said it found an error on one drive which it then said it fixed.

I restarted my computer (just in case)

Opened up LR and the 3 damaged images are still there. The RAW file LOOKS good until you try to work on it or export it and then it comes up with the usual "the file appears to be unsupported or damaged."

That image was kept on my external hard drive and backed up on another hard drive. All copies (on both drives) say it is damaged.

The image was edited in Topaz and I still have a good copy of the edited image. Although I'd rather have access to my NEF file which now won't open.

I have many thousands of digital files on those hard drives and to my knowledge, all others work fine.

(After I posted this and ran the file checks I went in and saw that all images I shot on that day that were in that file are damaged and un-openable)

 

[clee01l]

...The RAW file LOOKS good until you try to work on it or export it and then it comes up with the usual "the file appears to be unsupported or damaged."

Until you go to develop or attempt to export the image that you see is from the preview cache.

That image was kept on my external hard drive and backed up on another hard drive. All copies (on both drives) say it is damaged.

What happens if you try to open the image outside of LR? Especially if you use a different RAW editor that works with the RAW data and does not simply display the embedded JPEG?

The image was edited in Topaz and I still have a good copy of the edited image. Although I'd rather have access to my NEF file which now won't open.

I have many thousands of digital files on those hard drives and to my knowledge, all others work fine.

Keep in mind that Lightroom never writes to the NEF. It only opens the file to read it. So if your file is corrupt, and the back up is corrupt, something else happened before you created the backup to cause the backup to make a copy of a damaged file. Do you have version control with your backup scheme? Version control will store a version of your file(s) for every change that you make to the file. If you can go back far enough you should be able to get to the original copy made just after the file was copied from the card to the HDD.

 

[keiththom]

When I attempt to open the image in another program such as Capture NX2, it still will not open it.

I opened that folder and worked on those files quite a few times about a month ago with no problems. I would have thought that the images would be good on my second back up drive but maybe not since a while ago I copied everything from my #1 external drive to my #2 external drive and told it to replace all files. So if the image was damaged on my #1 external drive, it would have replaced the good one on my #2 drive with the damaged one.

I've never heard of "version control?" Is this something else I should have or be doing?

I was under the impression that by going out and purchasing two external hard drives, I was all set and protected??

 

[clee01l]

Version control is something that can be included in your system back up app. But it appears that you do not have a system backup app. Making a copy is often not 'good enough'. A system backup application runs automatically in the background making copies of every file that changes. It also keep copies of ever file that you delete. Version control in the backup app will insure that you can fall back to a previous version if you accidentally change important information in a file and there are backup versions of deleted files. This is protection for "Oops". A Manual copy does not protect you from the "Man" in Manual. "and told it to replace all files" is the mistake that you made. An backup program if it is efficient will know whether a file has changed or not. It will only back up incremental changes. Making a new backup of an old file that has not changed is wasteful of the bandwidth and not very efficient.

CrashPlan is free backup software that you can use on a schedule in the background to back up all of the critical user data that you choose, Critical data are files that you can not afford to lose (like original NEFs, Lightroom Catalogs, Word Documents and Spreadsheets and essential user settings).
http://www.code42.com/crashplan/
They also offer a subscription for $60 per year that will backup all of your critical user data to the cloud so that if fire, flood or other pestilence destroys your house and all of your HDDs you have an offsite location to recover from.

 

[keiththom]

Cletus: I downloaded the trial version of Crashplan and will seriously take a look at it.

I'm still a little confused at what a "system backup app" is or how I install / setup / use one? I run windows 8 if that makes any difference.

and by the way - thanks all for your tips and suggestions !!

 

[clee01l]

A bullet-proof backup scheme is one where every possible data loss event is covered. For corporations it has always been essential that there be a data recovery plan in place for proper risk management. This is also a good practice for the individual and many software companies have been formed to offer solutions. Some are better than others. IMO the best Backup solution covers all of the disaster scenarios and is something that runs automatically so that you don't have to think about it. Besides Crashplan (which is free for local backup) there are many other options, some for free and some for fee. A system backup plan is one that covers all of the critical user data on your system. You only have to decide what data files are critical and make sure they are included in the backup plan.

Apple has TimeMachine included with the OS. There is no equivalent to TimeMachine offered by Microsoft, although (I think) there is some backup app now included with Win8.

It is a Risk Management problem and you need to decide what level of risk you are comfortable taking. Some people don't mind losing a HDD and their data every two or three years... until they do. Data Risk Management 101, should IMO be required for all PC owners. It is probably negligence on the part of Microsoft and Apple not to stress this up front. At least Apple has a simple bulletproof backup system in TimeMachine. Unfortunately Apple users seem to come to the table with a lower sense of awareness about computers and many (most?) never implement TimeMachine.

 

[keiththom]

Hmmm - Looks like backing up my computer to the cloud with my internet connection would take several months. And I have very little data on my limited internet plan in this area. Which means I would have to pay the $125 charge for them to send me a hard drive to back my stuff up on.

The cloud backup plan is looking like it's getting more expensive.

 

[keiththom]

I had to go in and uninstall Crashplan. It was running in the background and using up all of my data plan and I didn't see a way to stop it. Before long it would have used up all my data plan and I would end up without internet access.:hm:

I guess not having direct unlimited internet is one of the downsides to living in a very rural area.

 

[clee01l]

I had to go in and uninstall Crashplan. It was running in the background and using up all of my data plan...

You don't need to uninstall it. Just don't use the Cloud backup. Instead backup to one of your local EHDs. Until about a week ago that is what I did. I am now a subscriber and CrashPlan continues to back up locally as well as to the cloud

 

[keiththom]

I'll give it a try Cletus. At the time, I couldn't quite figure out how to make it stop downloading to the cloud without killing the whole program. I'll install it again and hopefully it won't continue to download files online.

 

[keiththom]

Cletus: Do you know how I can stop it from downloading to the Cloud? Once I've set it to do, how can I stop it? I think I've paused it, but not even sure of that. I'll either have to find a way to stop it or uninstall it again.

 

[clee01l]

Cletus: Do you know how I can stop it from downloading to the Cloud? Once I've set it to do, how can I stop it? I think I've paused it, but not even sure of that. I'll either have to find a way to stop it or uninstall it again.

Click on "Destinations" then on the Cloud Storage item "CrashPlan Central". next click the button {Remove Backup Archive} I'm not sure it this will solve the problem, but I expect it might.

 

[kolesoff]

Oh, your problem is almost exactly the same thing I got. As it was said already, it is the external HDD problem, lightroom has nothing to do with it...
Clustered file deletion/corruption happened to me a while ago, when I was moving my 2.5' Lacie Porsche drive from home (Mac) to work (Win) and back every day. On Windows it usually had problems with power management, so I needed to force remove it several times. Then the next time I attached it to USB, there was a prompt to "verify" disk, otherwise it was unreadable. Funnily, the verification went ok, disk was shown to be good, etc, until after I found out that many files were corrupted... and EVEN MORE WERE MISSING!
I had a second external drive which I never move, and it was used as a backup of Lacie. Files were missing on it, too.
Luckily, I had my cloud storage set up and running (I opted for Zenfolio), and it took me some time to download all the missing and corrupted JPEG files (around 200 Gb), but they were recovered. As for the NEFs, they were lost. Not good but not too bad since I don't shoot for market, just random family photography.
Since thenI configure my HDD mirroring software more carefully, excluding 0kb files from back up (all the corrupted files were 0 kb), and excluding <5Mb RAWs from backup...

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

Long ago I lost images in lightroom because something corrupted them, and it was YEARS before I noticed and all my backup versions at that point had been overwritten.

Since then I've started using a mechanism to ensure that unchanging files actually do not change, and recommend it to people. There are many ways to do it -- there's a commercial tool called ImageVerifier (I used it a while, didn't like it), verification programs built into backup suites, etc. I ended up writing my own to checksum lightroom catalog files (I give it away if you are interested, http://lrvalidate.codeplex.com/, but that's not really the point).

I REALLY think this is something Lightroom should do itself. People with many terabytes of images on non-raid, home class machines are begging for corruption. But Lightroom doesn't (except a limited check for DNG files).

So users need to do it themselves.