This can't be happening..

May 1, 2008 3:58 AM

Something terrible has happened! I'm using Mac OS Leopard and had backed up my photos onto my 500gb external hard drive in order to format the computer. Everything was fine and my iPhoto library, all 3.4gb of it, was on the drive and then... a disaster. Please help!

With a fresh install of Leopard and the external drive connected and copying my music into iTunes, I opened iPhoto. That's all I did. Unfortunately, when I clicked on the folder 'Photos' on my external drive to restore my library which I had backed up the previous night, I discovered that just a moment prior to that (obviously when I'd opened iPhoto) it had been overwritten and now there was just 46mb of data there.... 46mb of nothing! Clearly the 46mb of nothing that inhabited the new install of iPhoto.

Jesus, noo! I don't believe this is happening to me.

So, am I completely screwed? The external drive is formatted to FAT32 if I recall correctly. How can I get it back?

Obviously I've disconnected the hard drive asap.

Please Metafilter.. Help me.

posted by Zé Pequeno to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Are you looking at your external Hard Drive through iPhoto's interface, or through Finder? Try looking through Finder first. A fresh install of Leopard would not automagically look on (and overwrite) your harddrive for the iPhoto library, it would look in your 'Pictures' folder on the built-in hard-drive.
posted by Happy Dave at 4:07 AM on May 1

He says he clicked on the photos folder on the external HD. If so then he needs to
1. stop doing anything involving saving or writing any files to the external drive
2. run disk tools to see if there are directory problems, and fix them if there are
3. get a hold of a third part disk utility that will recover data from a corrupt hard drive like 1) Disk Warrior by Alsoft
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/

2) Data Rescue by Prosoft
http://www.prosoftengineering.com/products/data_rescue_info.php?PHPSESSID=4abf8c6b852ac7b4429550de51aeac4e
posted by Gungho at 4:49 AM on May 1

Gungho is right. DO NOT write anything else to the external drive. For DIY recovery, I'm seconding Disk Warrior.
posted by Alterscape at 5:10 AM on May 1

Oh geez, good luck with it (not sarcasm). I've had a couple of scares like that and my current procedure is

1. I keep all my photos backed up in at least two places
2. If I am doing anything fancy with directories, I compress all the photos into a .rar file and store them somewhere else on the drive.

I've probably got three copies of every photo on my hard drive somewhere, but space is cheap and photos are irreplaceable. Let us know if you're succesful in getting them back, please!
posted by tomble at 5:17 AM on May 1

This won't help now, but (fingers crossed) if you are able to get the pictures back, you might want to look at an off-site storage solution like Mozy (www.mozy.com/home/) which will back up whatever you tell it to back up automatically, much like Time Machine, over the Internet. It's about $50/yr, but for critical things like this, it's worth it to me.

Sorry I couldn't address the question directly, but I don't trust external drives, so I thought I'd pass this along.
posted by socratic at 5:55 AM on May 1 [1 favorite]

I learned the hard way last summer that hard drives fail and take an awful lot of precious data with them. Since then I back up my photos to DVD (usually burning two copies).

I had no luck with Disk Warrior but that's because my hard drive was not only dead, it had magically transformed into a brick. Luckily I'd published the very best pictures in the bunch to Flickr and was able to just download them but I still lost a bunch of really great family vacation photos.

Never again!

If you are anywhere near Santa Cruz, California I would be more than happy to let you use my copy of Disk Warrior as it costs a hundred bucks to buy.
posted by fenriq at 8:23 AM on May 1

If the drive is FAT32 you aren't limited to OS X to check it. Any computer ought to be able to read it. Windows recovery tools might be able to recover files more easily than OS X ones will. There are several undelete tools that are free or have free trials; Convar.com has a few freebies you may wish to check out, at least one is specifically targeted to pictures.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:08 AM on May 1