Over the past month plus, I've been migrating all my primary programs and data to a new computer. (Old= Win 7 x64, New=Win 8.1 x64). PITA, but that's another story. My issue is this:
I maintain separate databases for my images. For instance, each commercial job has it's own, which stays with the drive it's archived on. All my travel images are in another database, my Ireland images from my book in yet another, and all my various portfolio images in another. One reason is I hate the idea of all images residing in one lone, massive database... for exactly the reason I'm about to mention. All the databases I use regularly, open fine on my new system EXCEPT one of the most crucial -- my portfolio images. I tried opening the database. It shows that there are images, including the folders that contain the various images, but ONLY displays gray boxes -- NO images. I finally tried opening the database backup, and it displayed the images properly. There is a slight size difference between the backup and the primary, but I believe everything is there -- the system dates were the same from the last time I opened them.
So, these are my questions:
Why won't Lightroom display previews, even though the previews exist? It doesn't even try to regenerate them.
Why does the backup not contain the flags and color codes that existed with the original database? Any way to retrieve them?
Is the best way to use the backup, rename the original database, something like "OLD", then copy the backup into the folder where the original resided?
Is there anyway, still, to recover the original, since it supposedly has the flagged and color coded files?
Thanks for the help.
Nemo