Friday, October 13, 2006

catastrophe!

On my MacBook Pro, I use the beta of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to edit and manage all of my photos. It's what I've been using to go through my pictures from Europe, as well as all the pictures I have taken since then including with my new speedlight.

So I was casually going through checking out the directory structure of the ~/Pictures/ directory comparing how Lightroom managed files as opposed to iPhoto and Aperture. Somehow, SOMEHOW, I managed to move the ENTIRE DIRECTORY to the trash. Yes, that trash. The one that deletes things.

Now the weird thing about OSX is that even though the directory was in the trash can, I was still able to access it directly from the root navigation panel when I opened my disk from the desktop, so I was unaware I was even browsing a deleted directory until I tried to open a photo and it bumped back an error. I opened the trash, which of course already had the usual ~30 files and folders ready for deletion, and didn't notice the folder called "Pictures", probably because it was surrounded by folders of pictures I had legitimately deleted.

This is the part where I say that you'd better be sitting down if you have a weak stomach.

So the trash can is giving me weird errors. How do I fix it? I empty the trash, naturally. So I did. I watched the progress window, which notes how many files are remaining to delete. On a good day, I have a hundred or so at a time, but this time it was counting UPWARD of 3,500, so as quickly as I could I selected the TINY little x to cancel.

It was too late. EVERY photo in my Lightroom library had been deleted. Every. Single. One. But here's my saving grace: I had all my Europe pictures duplicated in my iPhoto library as well from the pre-Lightroom days. Thank god.

Anyway, now when I open Lightroom, it looks somehting like this:



There are some "ghost" images which are still cached in the backup files that Lightroom automatically creates, but other than that, there's nothing; no hi-res images to be exported at all.

I was at work when this happened, so I stood up and cursed for a bit, told everyone my story, then the FIRST thing I did was create a DVD backup of all my important files, including what pictures I could salvage.

Moral of the story: Backup your data regularly!