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Author Topic: New Hard Drive Location & existing Catalog  (Read 3123 times)

Adam L

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New Hard Drive Location & existing Catalog
« on: February 22, 2014, 07:18:18 am »

Hi all,

My hard drive crashed yesterday, fortunately I have a backup that I was able to restore last night.   I see all my files via explorer.

The problem I am experiencing is with the existing catalog locating the existing files.   They moved, used to be on drive L: and are now on drive E:

The catalog found the last two years of files - 2013 and 2014 - but has failed to locate the other annual folders. 2001-2012.

Do you have any ideas of the cause and how I can get this corrected?

Maybe some additional advice is needed.   I have ordered six new 2TB drives that would go into a raid 0, with 3 drives of data broken into two volumes.   I won't have these available until the end of next week.   This means that I'll be transferring all the files over to a new drive and would need to repeat the above again next week.

I use a single catalog to store all images.
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Box Brownie

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Re: New Hard Drive Location & existing Catalog
« Reply #1 on: February 22, 2014, 08:32:24 am »

Hi all,

My hard drive crashed yesterday, fortunately I have a backup that I was able to restore last night.   I see all my files via explorer.

The problem I am experiencing is with the existing catalog locating the existing files.   They moved, used to be on drive L: and are now on drive E:

The catalog found the last two years of files - 2013 and 2014 - but has failed to locate the other annual folders. 2001-2012.

Do you have any ideas of the cause and how I can get this corrected?

Maybe some additional advice is needed.   I have ordered six new 2TB drives that would go into a raid 0, with 3 drives of data broken into two volumes.   I won't have these available until the end of next week.   This means that I'll be transferring all the files over to a new drive and would need to repeat the above again next week.

I use a single catalog to store all images.

Hi

If I read this correctly ~ your L drive crashed but you have installed your backup drive that was (by default) allocated E ?  Well on the surmise that L is now a letter you can use again surely you could have gone into "disk management" and changed the default allocation of E to L and the catalogue when LR was launched would be been none the wiser to the physical swap of the drives???

I hope that makes sense and those with greater knowledge can update/clarify as appropriate :)
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Adam L

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Re: New Hard Drive Location & existing Catalog
« Reply #2 on: February 22, 2014, 09:22:41 am »

I would agree if not for the fact that two years of photos moved from L to E. 

I made a new catalog on July 2013 when I moved to LR5.   Could I have been working with two catalogs since back then?  I see a feature to import from another catalog but don't want to take a bad problem and make it worse. 
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Tony Jay

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Re: New Hard Drive Location & existing Catalog
« Reply #3 on: February 22, 2014, 09:52:39 pm »

I would agree if not for the fact that two years of photos moved from L to E. 

I made a new catalog on July 2013 when I moved to LR5.   Could I have been working with two catalogs since back then?  I see a feature to import from another catalog but don't want to take a bad problem and make it worse. 
Whatever you do - don't re-import.
It should be possible to navigate to the folders that Lightroom has not found, like 2012, in the Lightroom Library module (Folder panel), and R-clicking on them and then following the instructions to "Find Missing folder".

Tony Jay
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wolfnowl

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Re: New Hard Drive Location & existing Catalog
« Reply #4 on: February 23, 2014, 02:06:03 am »

Quote
The problem I am experiencing is with the existing catalog locating the existing files.   They moved, used to be on drive L: and are now on drive E:

The catalog found the last two years of files - 2013 and 2014 - but has failed to locate the other annual folders. 2001-2012.

Do you have any ideas of the cause and how I can get this corrected?

Adam:  Am I correct in understanding that all of your images (and catalogue?) used to be on drive L but are now on drive E?  If all of the images are on the same drive, are they all in one parent folder or not?  In other words, do you have one parent level folder (like Pictures), and have the annual folders under that, or are they organized differently?

The answer to your question can be simple, depending on your folder structure.  When you import an image or images to LR, all the program does to begin with is to create an association between that image's location and the LR database (catalogue) that says, "This image is located here."  Now, 'here' can be any drive that the computer can read - an internal drive, an external drive, a flash drive, DVD... even the synced drive of something like Copy or Dropbox.  LR doesn't care, it just creates a dynamic link to each image.  Now, if you move images outside of LR (or if your drive crashes), then that dynamic link gets broken and LR doesn't know how to find the image(s) anymore.  That's why you get the ? (LR 1-4) or ! (Lr5 - go figure) in the upper right corner of the missing images.  What you need to do is to direct LR to where those images now reside, but you don't have to do it one image at a time.  By relinking 1 image in a folder LR will try to link all of the images in the same folder, and (if you check the box that says include subfolders) any images in subfolders as well.  That's why I asked if all of the images are in one parent folder.

What you want to do is to go to make sure that Library/ Show Photos in Subfolders is checked, and go to the top-most folder you have where images missing.  If you don't see that folder in the directory tree of the library grid on the left panel, right-click on the highest level folder you do have showing and select 'Show Parent Folder'.  So, if for example LR shows you annual folders of 2001, 2002, ... 2014 but they're all contained within a Pictures folder or something equivalent, you would right click on one of your annual folders and select Show Parent Folder to bring the Pictures folder into view.  If that's not the case and your file structure is organized differently, you may have to do this a few times to relink everything.

Once you can see the highest level folder that has missing files, you can either right-click on the missing folder and select Find Missing Folder or left-click on the little ? or ! (depending on LR version) icon on one of the missing files and select Locate File.  Both will get you to the same place.  LR will then ask you where the new location of the file or folder is, and you navigate there and highlight the file or folder in question.  Click Okay and LR will begin relinking the files, which basically updates the catalogue data entries with the new dynamic links.  It's not as complicated as it sounds.

Mike.
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D Fosse

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Re: New Hard Drive Location & existing Catalog
« Reply #5 on: February 24, 2014, 01:42:13 am »

My hard drive crashed yesterday

Which one? the system drive with your catalog, or the data drive with the image files (L)? Or are they both on the same drive?

In any case, Box Brownie's point was that if you still have the same folder structure on disk, changing drive letter is much easier than relinking.

Quote
Could I have been working with two catalogs since back then?

That depends on whether you converted the Lr4 catalog or created a new one. But if you did the latter, wouldn't you immediately have missed all the old photos? So that seems unlikely. But if you had two catalogs, you'd also have, well, two catalog files with the .lrcat extension. If your backup is complete, it'll be there.

This shouldn't be a problem if you have a dedicated data drive/array with all your image files, backed up to an identical clone with incremental backups. Synchronizing software is great for this - Microsoft offers the free SyncToy which works perfectly. Then backup the catalog (wherever it is) separately, or together with images.

The point is that no relinking should ever be necessary - only swap drives and change drive letter to get back to normal operation.
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Adam L

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Re: New Hard Drive Location & existing Catalog
« Reply #6 on: February 24, 2014, 06:49:44 am »

Hi all,  thanks so much for the advice.  I intend to try to get this to work tonight and will report back, hopefully with good news.
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Tony Jay

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Re: New Hard Drive Location & existing Catalog
« Reply #7 on: February 24, 2014, 07:04:18 am »

We look forward to good news!

Tony Jay
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Adam L

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Re: New Hard Drive Location & existing Catalog
« Reply #8 on: February 24, 2014, 07:23:01 pm »

Yes!  It is all restored.   Thank you. 

now on to my iTunes library. 
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Tony Jay

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Re: New Hard Drive Location & existing Catalog
« Reply #9 on: February 24, 2014, 07:25:10 pm »

That is good news!!

Tony Jay
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