Near Disaster! Panic? Not Really; Lessons Learned! Here's What Went Wrong and Right

Two Horses and Red Barn; Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

www.dennismook.com

Over the weekend I wanted to slightly change my automated backup procedure for my images and Lightroom catalog data, i.e., previews and database information.   I keep my images on a second, state-of-the-art internal 3TB hard drive while my catalog files, Lightroom backups, etc., sit in the My Pictures file in a sub-file entitled Lightroom on my C drive.  That is where Lightroom by default put them and I have left them there.

I wanted to also keep a copy of those catalog/backup files on the second drive right with my images so they would be together.  I instructed my backup program to execute a nightly backup procedure to back up that C drive Lightroom folder onto the F drive (the second internal one with the images).  I went ahead and did that.  When I went to check if all of the files and info copied, to my surprise (no horror), all my images had been deleted.  ALL of THEM!  95,000 files GONE!  Crap!  Said some other choice things to myself also...

The initial horror and panic quickly subsided as I knew I could recreate the images.  You see, I have three additional backups of my images, Lightroom catalog and all my documents, music, videos, etc.  Two copies are backed up each night and the third, offsite copy, is backed up once or twice a month.  The nightly backups had properly executed and I had just made that monthly backup on August 1.  So, the images were there.  I just had to restore them to the F drive.

After copying all the images to the F drive, Lightroom didn't match up the XMP sidecar files and metadata to the images so I had invoke the command for Lightroom to go out and read the XMP data and plug it into the correct images.

All this took hours.  All this work, with some consternation and a lot of adrenaline, because of my error.  As careful as I am, I (with a capital I) made the error.  If I can, you can. 

Here is what happened.  When I set up the backup/synchronization procedure to copy the Lightroom folder from the C drive to the F drive with my images, the program was set to sync from left to right.  Well, my images are NOT on my C drive, so the sync program, making an exact copy, didn't find the images on the C drive so it deleted them.  My fault as I invoked the wrong command.  Instead of a full synchronization, I should have invoked an incremental synchronization.  Oversight.  Luckily, I was able to get everything back as was only because of my fastidious backup procedure.  Nothing was lost.

If I had only been backing up once a week instead of nightly, I would have lost all the images from a recent road trip as well as some small studio imagery I created last week.

If I had not been so careless, I wouldn't have had to go through hours of additional work just to get back where I was.

I had had been thinking carefully, rather than casually, I wouldn't have put myself and my computer through this mess.

Lesson Learned:  Think, think, think.  Even when you are sure you are executing the right command or making some other affirmative move with your images, stop and think it through one more time.  Save yourself some trouble and possibly a disaster.  Learn a lesson from my carelessness.

Thanks for looking.  Enjoy!

Dennis Mook