iPhoto LIbrary missing after Snow Leopard upgrade MISSING FROM TimeCapsule!

WOW, at least you can see its there! You have HOPE Obe1.... Others that aren't so lucky, and believed the stupid Time Capsule hype and got burned..

I am now doing a DEEP scan number 2 with File Salvage and I have 30K Jpegs identified, so I will be able to recover 90% of it, but I still have to "sort through" them to trash unwanted application Jpegs and other crap.

At least I had mine backed up till September of last year on an external drive, so its just 12 months of reworking it all back.

Now I'm going to have 3 sources, the original laptop, the TC sh*t and now SuperDuper it to another drive. Oh yeah... I remember the good old days of "Retrospect" where I could pull off anything from anytime in the past. Forget Time Capsule.

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.

Once bitten twice shy is the adage ..... perhaps after this time, being reminded of their shortcomings they will remember to do this in future and as such, no longer waste the time of those volunteers who waste their evening trying to help ungrateful people who think we do this for money . You know, ungrateful people the likes of whom you see in the mirror each morning ?

If people took backups then the number of people asking what to do without backups would reduce considerably.

Yes, thats the point... we ARE backing up... WITH APPLES RECOMMENDED SOLUTION, which DOES NOT WORK.

< Edited by Host >

Mark Armstrong1 wrote:
Yes, thats the point... we ARE backing up... WITH APPLES RECOMMENDED SOLUTION, which DOES NOT WORK.

< Edited by Host >

Well, it does for me at least. Sorry about your difficulties though.

Silly question which is worth asking again - how do you know your iPhoto library was in your Home folder and not elsewhere if its gone off your hard disc ? Could you have rebuilt it in the past and accidentally placed it outside of the Home folder ? Perhaps in the Shared area ?

Does anyone know of a program that can recover or upgrade a library? I know where it is but iPhoto can't read it.

One other point for users with lost libraries, I am using Data Rescue II and was able to also restore files from older SD cards that not been overwritten. Probably not much help for those of you with years of photos, but if you lost a couple of months and have alot of cards in rotation, the originals were likely not overwritten.

Not a silly question... No, I didn't move it. Ever. I like to keep everything stock as possible, so when the OS is upgraded/changed, everything is right where it should be, as expected.

I'm a mac user since 1989. I have been through-a-many change, which is great most of the time. But when I'm following the procedure as told, for optimum usage, and it blows up in your face, well, it can be discouraging.

I have been using File Salvage and its been running for 5 days straight, and has identified almost 50K jpegs. I will recover most, but still will have to recreate the iphoto library.

I'm just disheartened for those many thousands of folks that don't back up as regularly, or not at all, and they don't even have the first clue on how to utilize programs to search for files that the system can't find.

Has anyone heard anything encouraging from Apple? I think that our libraries are on our machines so this is really a matter of Apple providing a tool to recover them.

Mark,

I would encourage you to ask SubRosaSoft about the different results you get when you recover files using directory data as opposed to "scavenging" the volume, and whether it makes a difference whether the files were fragmented or not.

No matter what happens, you are in for a bit of work, and I hope this experience will not be repeated.

Charles,

From the simple interface and instructions, I did a "recovery" with just directory data and stored that pull on an external drive.

I am doing a low level scavenging now, which obviously will result in some damaged files (which I expect). Interestingly enough, out of the almost 60K files its identified so far, there is ZERO bad blocks counted by FS.

I also dumped another 20 gig off the drive in hopes that the work I'm doing now might not over-write addition files that could possibly be recovered.

I'm confident that the last 12 months was only a few thousand photos at best, so it will be time consuming. The balance of a decade has been offline stored for quite some time. (DVDs, etc)

In reviewing the initial 10K pulled from a quick save using the directory, there is quite a bit of application junk and repeat (duplicates) of stupid web browsing trash, so I'm expecting that this final pull will result in 90% plus of trashable jpegs and movie files.

Lets hope Apple can soon save the rest of the world of Mac users that treasure their digital memories before too many lose one of the most important types of data on their computer.... the "uninstallable" ones, personal photos and movies.

Thanks for the details.

Recovery using directory data should produce files that have their original names and are undamaged, provided they were not overwritten. When scavenging recovers files without using directory data, the original name is not recoverable, and files that are fragmented cannot be recovered, in general.

I saw a reference a few months ago to a new recovery program specifically designed to attempt to reassemble recovered pieces of photos, probably based on pattern matching. If I can find it again, I will add it to this thread. I do not recall whether the program was limited to working on the original SD or CF card or not.

NOW I KNOW THE REST OF THE MYSTRY

I lost my IPHOTO LIBRARY TOO. 1 year (40GB) of photos lost after I installed Leopard. I checked the files and gone and I read everything about snow leopard and it says nothing about saving your iphoto library...

I am also real mad...

I live in Seoul Korea so this is the only way for me to find the fix.

Well, you haven't lost them, the OS has... you should use some tools such as I have done to pull the files from the hard drive before you start overwriting the lost files.

They are there, just iphoto has no clue anymore. If you are like me, there is no library, then you need to get some tools that will dig into the drive and extract the images/movies.

Good luck, I'm past being in denial (Apple wouldn't do this to me), angry (that my Time Capsule had no backup), bargaining (ones and zeros don't negotiate), depression (that was over the second I started recovering files) and now working through acceptance (that Apple's SW isn't quite what they tout it as) : )

Have you tried?:

Hold down the Option key while clicking on iPhoto (one time) to start it.

This brings up a list of all available iPhoto libraries. If you library is in the wrong place or has the wrong name, Option-click-iPhoto might locate the missing library.

seoulmac wrote:
NOW I KNOW THE REST OF THE MYSTRY

I lost my IPHOTO LIBRARY TOO. 1 year (40GB) of photos lost after I installed Leopard. I checked the files and gone and I read everything about snow leopard and it says nothing about saving your iphoto library...

I am also real mad...

I live in Seoul Korea so this is the only way for me to find the fix.

Have you checked that the machine has actually got 40Gb extra hard disc space after the installation or is it just that they may have been put somewhere else ? (don't rely on Spotlight to find them though)