DagnyTaggart6 wrote:
When I reinstalled iPhoto, all my missing photos suddenly reappeared. I don't understand what happened but I'm just happy that they all magically reappeared somehow.
For people reading these threads, wondering how files or programs could somehow "disappear" consider some of the following possibilities:
* People having access to your computer doing something by accident (or intentionally). And it doesn't have to be people even, we have seen posts about cats running across keyboard and deleting files.
* Searching for files, say in Spotlight or File => Find, and then deleting some of the entries in that found file list by selecting it and hitting command D or other similar keystrokes. This can actually delete the file in question.
* Dragging a file across the screen or directories and unintentionally (and unknowingly) depositing it into a package, thus changing that package (iPhoto Library and the iPhoto program itself are actually packages). Or accidentally moving files.
* Running low on disk space, at which point some files can be damaged or even overwritten.
* File catalog errors that may make it impossible to find or access a file (iPhoto library) or one of the folders inside it. You can check your disk for these errors by running Disk Utility.
* Other user activities, such as the following that was posted above:
"We needed her 'password', which she didn't have, so we reset it using a boot disk and the password recovery utility." I am wondering what might have actually been reset here in this instance. Was the correct boot disk used even?
"The system did a software update overnight." How could that be? The Mac requires an administrator to enter a password before installing programs or doing system updates. Who entered the password to enable the software update?
* This one is my favorite: when one installs a Window partition on the Mac, some installations (such as with Parallels) enable the user who is using Windows to access, move, change, and even DELETE files that are on the Mac side of the disk. This can result in files "disappearing" literally without a trace on the Mac side.
* Anyone using terminal can, with a few keystrokes, remove files without a trace, intentionally or unintentionally. although usually an administrator password is required.
* Computers being shut down by unplugging or holding the power button. Can damage file catalogs and result in files being "lost."
* Users trying to change their user name (short name). This can result in files being lost and question marks appearing on the dock where programs like iPhoto used to be.
* Question marks appearing on the dock where iPhoto used to be. This can be a symptom of someone moving iPhoto out of the Applications folder, or deleting things from that folder, or disk corruption, or a damaged installation of the program in question.
* Hard drives that may be failing or damaged will be uable to access or even see files in some areas of the disk.
There are many more examples of things like those I've listed above, and it is virtually impossible to diagnose some of these remotely over the internet in these discussion venues (but some can be diagnosed and fixed in these discussions).
I think the best guard against these sorts of problems is having at least one backup of everything, preferably two. The two types of backups that I use are (1) Time Machine, and (2) SuperDuper "clones". [As for item (2), there are other programs like SuperDuper that do this quite well, I use SuperDuper.] And after doing these backups, one should check manually to verify that the most irreplaceable items have in fact been properly backed up. Typically those irreplaceable items are photos; music can usually be re-downloaded from Apple or re-copied from CDs or from ipods, so that might not be as important. Personal Documents that are important should also be checked (tax returns, PhD thesis, etc.). The folders should be there with the same size as on the original disk, and even doing a dry run of restoring these files (in a scratch area) and checking that they are properly restored is a good practice. Hard drives usually have moving parts and they all eventually fail, 100% do fail, it's when, not if. And the newer ones without moving parts are basically large banks of memory chips, which can also fail. None of the users posting here who say they "lost all my photos" apparently had a viable backup, and everyone using computers with anything of value in them should have viable backups. That is really the best insurance against these disasters.
