Resetting your Lightroom folder structure...

So if you have been following my dilemma of the dead 6TB LaCie drive you know that I now have my pictures back from the dead by using CrashPlan's recovery. Well now come step two! I need to have everything in my Lightroom 5 library relocate all of the original files which are now on a new hard drive.

First when looking at the Lightroom 5 catalog you see a bunch of '?' and gray folders which signify that the files can not be found.

Now how do we restore the files even though the drive "LaCie" is not around anymore?

It is actually easier than one might think. I will start by reconnecting the "CaptureOne" folder and all of its subfolders:

1. Right click on the missing folder. In this case I will right-click on the "CaptureOne" folder which was on the LaCie drive.

2. Select "Find Missing Folder..." and locate the folder on the new hard drive.

That's it!!! Now when you look at the Folders in Lightroom you will see the CaptureOne folder is now located on the new Drive!!!

Thank you Adobe for making Lightroom 5 so easy to use!

Backup, Backup, Backup, Make sure you have a good backup!

A little over two weeks ago I woke up, went into my office and notices that my iMac had a message that my LaCie 6TB drive had been improperly ejected. This was strange since I always have everything on and never turn off a drive. And I have not not figured out how to do such while I am sleeping. However, I had seen this a couple of times before. So I looked at the LaCie drive and the light was on but no body was home :) So I rebooted the computer in hopes that the drive just fell asleep. After the reboot NOTHING!

No it was time to break out the tools at my disposal. Having been a Mac user/developer since 1983 I have brought back many drives from the brink of collapse.

I started with Apple's disk utility. It did not even see the drive. So I want to DiskWarrior it to did not see the drive. After a little work and a lot of swearing I was able to get part of the drive to appear in Apple's Disk Utility. I say part because the 6TB drive is actually 2 3TB drives connected via RAID0 - Striped. (This would turn out be be my first “Ah Ha” moment.

When I got the drive I thought it was set up as a redundant RAID (making copies of everything on each drive). Oh, did I mention that this was the main drive for all of my images? 1.2 TB of photographs! My mistake #1... No that I could see a little in Disk Utility this was what I was presented with...

Not a good sign! However, since I did see one of the drives was good I hoped I could just mount it and get some (if not all) of my images... Now the fun starts...

I called LaCie tech support and opened a ticket online. After being on the call with support (which they did an ok job) we tested 3 different Thunderbolt cables, 2 power adapters, and 2 computers with no luck. So this response was that it may need a new power adapter. The sent me a replacement power adapter. Which after plugging it in had no luck. So they then suggested send the whole drive back. (But if I want to try a recovery service I could). Since I have never had any good luck with recovery services I just sent the drive back... Now here is where the backups come in...

I make sure I have several backups (at least that's the plan). About 8 months ago I started using CrashPlan (I was already using Carbonite, however carbonite does not back up external drives and Crashplan does.) So I looked at my console in the CrashPlan app and it had the complete LaCie backup (now I'm breathing a sigh of relief). Next stop Apple Store to get a new drive!

I went to my Apple store to get the G-Tech 4TB Thunderbolt drive. I have never had a problem with G-Tech (except one time and then sent me a new drive with a bigger capacity). So I picked up the drive and headed back home, plugged it in and told CrashPlan to restore my LaCie volume to the new G-Tech drive... No problem... Except that the way that CrashPlan works is that it uses only a portion of your drives network. So it said it would take 18+ days to restore! Yikes!!!

I think remembered! Bing! What about my Time machine backup which I have going to my NAS drive here? So I opened the System Preferences and looked at my Time Machine only to see that the external LaCie drive was not being backed up!?! That shot that idea!

So a couple of days into the backup I called the G-Tech support to see if there was any setting I could change to get the bandwidth faster... No luck! But they did tell me about their Restore to door service. With this service you pay a fee ~$150 and they will send you all of your data on a HD to restore. Then you send the drive back. So I did this and in a few short days I had the drive. Keep in mind that the original restore was still happening and it still had over 13 days remaining.

No I got the drive from CrashPlan. Plugged it in and set up the restore as described in their instructions. Things seemed to be going ok. It told me it would be about 8 hours to restore the 1.2TB. So I went to bed, figuring that when I woke up Santa would have restored my valuable images! :)

No such luck. It stopped and it said there were errors but would not tell me what these errors were... So I started it over, headed off to work and hoped for the best... I checked in on it via Remote Access only to see that there were still errors coming up. So now it was time to get CrashPlan support involved (Code42 is the company). I spoke wit ha nice guy there and we looked at a few thing but nothing jumped out. He then opened a ticket and I said I would call them when I got home. He was nice and told me that they would have someone call me at the time I wish and the tech's name was Matt T.

So I got the call from Matt T. when I got home and we walked through several things. Finally he took over control of my computer. To make a long story short, he did reassure me that all of my data was safe on their servers. However, it looked like the drive they sent me was BAD! Now keep in mind this was a Friday afternoon and they are in Minnesota. By the time we were done his boss was gone. So now I wait again. Monday they will be sending me a new drive...

In the mean time I additionally purchased a new Drobo 5D DAS with 5 – 2TB drives and I will configure it to be redundant so I will not have a drive go bad again...

So now I wait for; 1) My replacement restore drive from CrashPlan; 2) My new Drobo 5D; 3) My replacement LaCie drive...

The saga continues...

After ordering the Drobo 5D, 5 HD and the RAM upgrade from Amazon on Saturday with my Prime account. I got a notice that the Drives and the RAM would be delivered on 4/7. Then after midnight I got a notice that the Drobo would be delivered on 4/7 too... Great news, nope. The drive delivered by UPS made it by 6PM. The delivery of the drives and the RAM on OnTrac delivery still has not made it and it is now after 9PM... Called and they rescheduled for delivery tomorrow... Tuesday is another day... So I just went to turn off the lights and low and behold the drives have arrived! Just got done setting everything up with Double Redundancy!

So today I got the RESTORE drive (the new one) from Code42 (CrashPlan) as of 10AM it has been preparing for the restore... In addition the original LaCie 6TB drive has been replaced and tested by LaCie and a new one has been shipped.

Synchronizing...

The restore process has started! 7 Hours to go...

10:45 PM and all of my photos are back!!! Thank you!!!

So the moral of the story kids!?! BACKUP BACKUP and BACKUP again! Have one local backup, one backup in the cloud, and do an offsite backup (give a disk to a friend!).

As I was writing this I saw the following post:

How I Lost Over a Hundred Photographs to a Corrupted Memory Card, And Got Them Back

My, how we all suffer!