Recovery of deleted Lightroom catalogue.

[Justin]

Hi,

  I recently accidentally managed to format one of my internal hard drives containing photos and my Lightroom catalogue. Thankfully I had most of my photos backed up, although not quite up to date, but some recovery software managed to recover those that weren't.

Unfortunately, and very foolishly (lesson learnt), I didn't have my Lightroom catalogue backed up. I used a software recovery program called Recuva which located and recovered my photos but failed to find the Lightroom catalogue. I tried a different piece of software called Puran File Recovery and this successfully found and recovered all of my photos also. It also found and recovered my Lightroom catalogue and all of Lightroom's preview files but unfortunately the catalogue doesn't appear to hold any information (0 bytes) as can be seen in the attached image.


Does anyone have any idea why this is and could anyone advize me  please on the best way to get back my Lightroom catalogue? Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you.

[mlewis]

You could retry other data recovery software.  Get Data Back is a good one.

The main thing to do is make sure that nothing writes to the affected disk.

With file recovery some files just are not recoverable for various reasons such as part of it has been overwritten.  In this situation there isn't anything you can do about it really except maybe send the disk to a specialist recovery company which will cost a lot.  If you had saved your edits to sidecar xmp files then you can restore your latest edits but not virtual copies.

[wolfnowl]

Ouch... well, obviously the barn door is open and the horse is long gone.

The first option is to hold down the Alt or Opt key and start LR - this will force it to ask you which catalogue you want to open and you can direct it to the restored catalogue.

Did you back up the metadata to the files or is it all held in the catalogue? If you backed up the metadata you can create a new catalogue, import the images and LR will read the metadata on import. You'll lose a few things like Collections and flags, but you'll gain most of it back.

If not... hmmm... What MIGHT work is this. LR creates a different folder for each catalogue so what you could do is create a new catalogue with a different name - Catalogue 2 or whatever, and reimport the images, then close LR, go to your file manager and copy the subfolders (previews, etc.) from the old catalogue folder into the new folder, overwriting what's there. Then restart LR. I don't know if that would work or not, but it might be worth a try.

Mike.

[Justin]

Thank you for the suggestions so far. I'll try the other recovery software and see how I get on.
I saved any edits straight to the catalogue rather than in XML files. Is that what is meant by saving the metadata or is that something  different altogether?

[wolfnowl]

I believe you mean .xmp files, and yes, we're basically talking about the same thing. RAW files save the metadata in what are called sidecar files (.xmp); .jpg, .dng, .tif, .png and .psd files save the metadata within the files themselves.

Mike.

[Justin]

Thanks