scratchy513 wrote:
What exactly is the purpose of all of the a-holes on these threads telling everyone they should have backed-up better. No kidding. Thanks for all the insight. If you can't help us solve the specific problem, go away.
Congratulations on your ability to take a post in completely the wrong way, even having been warned against doing so. So far, the only "a-hole" I've seen in this thread is someone posting under the name "scratchy513" who apparently thinks that data loss counts as a license to be rude to someone who was trying to be politely and respectfully helpful and, in any case, was talking to someone else. You don't get to dictate whether or not that advice is unwelcome.
The person to whom I responded wrote, "What did I do wrong?" Silly me, I answered that question. I thought it might help, regardless of the resolution of this specific event, to have a more complete understanding of how to minimize the risk of having it happen again. It's my experience that as small a percentage of people who understand the importance of backing up, a similar portion of
that group understands how important it is to verify the backup. If one person is able to recover from losing the pictures that document their child's life as a result of that advice, it was worth me posting it no matter how rude you think you're entitled to be. That, to answer
your question, is the purpose of telling people how to have more reliable backups. Or was I not supposed to answer that one either?
I can't help you get your data back because I don't have access to your machine or any other that experienced the problem so I don't know what actually caused it and if it might be somewhere to recover. I can conceive of several possibilities, some of which coincide with the SL install rather then result from it. It's fairly clear, in fact, that the SL install is not the entire story. Something else is causing the complete absence of iPhoto Library backups, for example, and that something may be as simple as Time Machine's documented behavior of skipping the library when iPhoto is running. You never even mentioned if you've confirmed that the iPhoto Library is not in TM's user-configured exemption list. That'd be the first thing I'd look at, as it seems much more likely than the idea that iPhoto has been running every single time TM has run in at least the past year. Considering how often I've been called to do software support over something a user did a year ago and then forgot about until it impacted them, I think that's an important thing to rule out.
For the lost data on the boot disk, my opinion is that the best candidate is directory corruption. I haven't yet seen anyone post information that rules it out. Find me someone that experienced data loss during the SL upgrade after having run DiskWarrior or the equivalent and I'll reconsider.
How do you get the data you've lost back? Well, we're back to the answer you didn't like. And there's no answer I can give you from here that you don't already probably know. There is no guaranteed way to get back lost data. The most reliable way to recover from data loss is to have a solid backup strategy. Anything that involves scavenging the disk from which the data was lost is a crap shoot, even if you manually deleted the file 30 seconds ago. If you really value your data, there are services that will take your HD and scrounge around on it much more thoroughly than any retail or shareware program you'll get, but they're not cheap and still not guaranteed to succeed. If - and it's a big if - you can demonstrate that the SL installation was the cause of the loss, you might be able to get Apple to pay for the attempt. That's the only honest answer you'll get, like it or not.
