[drewh01]

Hi, I have been using Mac's for many years and have implemented a great data backup system.

First some info: I have a quicksilver dual gig with 3 SATA drives connected to a PCI card. I am a photographer and get very paranoid about losing files so I thought I had a rather good backup plan.

A couple of weeks ago I downloaded a full 2 gig CF card of images and one partial CF card to a internal HD that is set up as my main archive data drive. I also have a external eSATA that i constantly use as a backup to my main drive. I also use Carbon Copy Cloner tp backup my system HD (which is dedicated to only system and apps). Every Friday I synk all of my data to this drive and periodically burn data DVD's to always have a hard copy.

When I came to my main archive drive I noticed that one folder was completly empty! I was horrified! I searched all over and those particular photos just would not show themselves. I KNOW that I took them off my card as it was my standard practice to do just that. PLUS, I always create a catalog in iView that sits in each particular project folder. The iView catalog showed each and every photo with a image path to my original folder, but I got the red "missing data" error.

Luckily my final backup plan saved my butt as about 90% of the photos were able to be restored as I always keep my CF cards in archive for at least 2 weeks before using them again. (See how paranoid I am??) Unfortunately I thought I had a a backup and used the partial card I shot to the point where the files are unable to be retrived.

I just ran Data Rescue II to recover my deleted items and came up with over 20gigs of data that did NOT contain my missing photos, I viewed photos sets as far back as last year. If I did accidentially delete these pics (which I doubt) it would have happened at my last archive & clean (run DW, repair permissions, system checks..etc.) last Friday. What's even crazier is that another photo set from the same day is partially missing on my #1 archive drive. But my external backup has the complete folder and contents

I am totally confused why I cannot find these photos? Could my last DiskWarrior session have made them unacessable? I also normally run OnyX, could that be a problem? I noticed in the latest version (1.8) that I have the option under Maintenance>reset to "Display of folders content" and "LaunchServices database". Is this something I should try? I am about to run Data Rescue again on my entire drive and see if it pulls something up. Yikes! I really need help!

Should I run DW? I am really scared to do anything further.

Any ideas??

thanks!

[skybolt]

Have you tried to "rebuild" your iPhoto? I had some photo loss a short while ago, and when I ran the "rebuild" nothing good happened. Then I ran the "manual" rebuild. Everything came back! Now, the instructions from Apple on how to do this state that there could be some duplication of files and loss of titles, comments, etc. and I did find this to be true. I have approximately 3,000 photos, and when the rebuild was done, I had 15,000. But, having the photos back was worth what I had to go through to retrieve what I wanted.

Good luck!