What to do when your hard drive fails?

[dougsturgess]

The last 3 weeks I've been migrating all my digital images from DVD's to an Acomdata 1TB external hard drive (I wouldn't recommend that brand after my experience). The drive failed this morning & my data is not accessible.

I'm lucky that I haven't lost any data as all images are on DVD. I'll just have to start over with a new drive. I do have the most recent catalog backups for the images on that drive, but of course now Lightroom shows them as empty since it can't read the drive.

My question is if the backups do me any good since I'll now have to reimport all the images. To further complicate things, I renamed all the images upon import into a "'811'1_Custom Text_original suffix" renaming template which can be followed again when I reimport.

I'm not the best at describing this so I hope it's not too confusing. I'd appreciate hearing from anyone with any ideas or who has experienced the same thing.

Thanks.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

So the images on the DVD's.... do they have the same numbers as the files that were in LR?

Reimport's not an issue, and relinking files in funny places is doable, but weird filenames makes it more complicated.

 

[dsturgess]

So the images on the DVD's.... do they have the same numbers as the files that were in LR?

Reimport's not an issue, and relinking files in funny places is doable, but weird filenames makes it more complicated.

Well, no, but they will. Here's why. The files on my archived DVD's are just the camera file names, you know, like IMG_1143.CR2. So, what I did before was to transfer them as is onto the hard drive. Once there, I imported them into Lightroom changing the name using the template I mentioned above, then converted them all to DNG. So, what I'll have to do now is do the same thing all over & try to remember the unique names I used when changing the file names.

Does that make sense?

P.S. I bought a DROBO today w/2 1TB hard drives so I don't ever have this happen again!

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Yep, I'm with you I think!

So you'll start a new catalog, and import off the DVD's, renaming as you go. You can always check back on your backup catalog to see what names you used. That'll give the files the right names, and hopefully a similar directory structure.

Then you'll open up the old catalog, and just relink those files with your original catalog, thereby giving you all of your settings back too.

Is that what you're thinking? If so, that'll work!

 

[Andrew Hayton]

Its a shame about the drive going down but if you follow the steps you did the first time around to rename the images and convert them to DNG then you should be able to use the old catalogue with any of its metadata and changes you may have made to any of the images. If you hadn't made any adjustments to the files other than filename then you could just start with a new catalogue.
Did you get the newer Drobo with firewire 8'' and usb 2.', if so could you let us know how you get on?

 

[johnbeardy]

Time too for a feature request - Lightroom really should be able to use the EXIF information to match thumbnails back to the original files. Reliance on the filename alone is unhelpful.

 

[dougsturgess]

I'm going to try and follow the same naming protocol & then relink the catalog. I hope that works. We'll see. I've been rearchiving the files since Saturday but haven't yet relinked the catalog. I'll let you know how it goes.

My apologies to Victoria for not responding earlier. I read your email on my iPhone and understood what you were saying then forgot to reply.

I get the Drobo tomorrow and look forward to transferring all my data to it. I got 2 1TB drives so will have slightly less than 1TB of free space to start with which will be plenty. I just added an 8'' Firewire to my desktop this morning so should be ready.

 

[dougsturgess]

Time too for a feature request - Lightroom really should be able to use the EXIF information to match thumbnails back to the original files. Reliance on the filename alone is unhelpful.

John, have you suggested this to Lightroom in the suggestions link at the top of the forum page? Your idea would be great if they can make it work.

 

[johnbeardy]

Oh yes, it's something I've put directly to Adobe, and it's not an idea I'll drop. LR2 took a step back in reconnecting missing files, and it really needs to move forward in a more intelligent manner than filename-based matching. Matching based on exif and other data is very much in tune with the LR philosophy of hiding the cleverness.

 

[dougsturgess]

Oh yes, it's something I've put directly to Adobe, and it's not an idea I'll drop. LR2 took a step back in reconnecting missing files, and it really needs to move forward in a more intelligent manner than filename-based matching. Matching based on exif and other data is very much in tune with the LR philosophy of hiding the cleverness.

Hopefully everything will come together in update 2.2!