Did a backup now photos are gone.

[DoctorP]

My wife bought me an external hd for Xmas. I got it all set up and went to back up my catalog to the new hd. Did the back up, went into LR and all my photos were missing. It is as if LR restore it self back to March. Everything I have done since then is gone. I do have the original RAW files saved elsewhere but my edited photos are missing. Any suggestions? Thanks

 

[Replytoken]

Welcome to the forum! Did you create a backup in LR, or did you copy the files to the external drive through your computer's OS?

--Ken

 

[RikkFlohr]

I suspect that you've opened an old catalog by accident and that your current catalog may be lurking on your drive still. Search your drive for *.LRCAT files and see what you have for "Last Modified Date" Your most recent should be the current-unless you've created a new catalog in the meanwhile.

 

[Brad Snyder]

Or, a similar suggestion to Rikk's, within Lr, menu > File > Open Recent > and see if you've had other catalogs open, and if one of those is the correct catalog.

 

[DoctorP]

I did a backup through LR.

Originally I thought I just opened another catalogue but when I went searching for my main catalogue I only found one other one and that was not it either.

 

[Kiwigeoff]

Have you used Spotlight to look for .lrcat files yet???

 

[DoctorP]

yup

 

[Denis Pagé]

Welcome to Lightroom Forums Doctor!

In your first post you say that you did the backup and then went into Lightroom. In the next, you say you did it from whitin Lightroom. Can you please tell us step by step what you did from pluggin in the new external?

 

[DoctorP]

What I meant was that I opened LR and it prompted me to do a backup. I did the backup, saving the backup to the new HD. Once that was done Lr finished opening up and all my photos were gone.

 

[clee01l]

[quote author=DoctorP link=topic=8761.msg59979#msg59979 date=1263444776]
What I meant was that I opened LR and it prompted me to do a backup. I did the backup, saving the backup to the new HD. Once that was done Lr finished opening up and all my photos were gone.
[/quote]Where are you storing your images and where are you storing your Catalog. If you are storing your images on a external HD, is it plugged in? When you say your images are gone, do you mean the folder panel had no image folders? the image folders are grayed out? or something else? Are you opening a new (empty) catalog on start up?
The prompt for a back up on start is irrelevant to the problem.