Data loss--emergency, help please!

[HelpPlease]

My external hard drive dropped and supposedly the files on it are now unrecoverable. I had a client's session that was backed up except for one memory card, and the data on that card had been imported into lightroom. Unfortunately, I had just moved my lightroom database onto the external hard drive to temporarily free up some memory on my laptop's drive, but I do see that I have one lightroom catalog saved onto a memory card. When I open Lightroom and try to load that catalog, I don't see any photos though, just gray boxes. Is there any hope that these photos are somewhere?

I know this may be a little hard to follow. I'm tired and stressed. I've also learned my lesson about backing up in a major way and have ordered two new external drives and a smaller, portable drive so this never happens again. Please help me if you can!

 

[Replytoken]

Can you still pull the original data from the memory card? If the card has not been re-used, it may be possible that the images are still there.

You can also try the LR viewer from Marc Rochkind. He is the author of Image Ingester Pro. His viewer program may be able to read your catalog's preview cache.

Good luck,

--Ken

 

[Braders]

If money is not an issue and u live in the US, go here

http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/

 

[Brad Snyder]

When you say you moved the LR catalog onto the external drive, what exactly did you move?

In this case, we're concerned with two components,
1) 'some_catalog_name'.lrcat - which is a database file that contains no images, just the records of the work you've performed in a database format.
2) 'some_catalog_name'.lrdata - this is a folder (on PC, on Mac, it's called a package) with a very extensive subfolder structure that contains cached previews of your images to expedite display, scrolling, navigation, etc.

If you can get these two components located together in the same folder somewhere, that may solve the 'gray box' problem and will enable you to pursue the 'LRViewer' option of partial image recovery.