restoring a collection from a backup

[DavidHoffmanuk]

I saved a long & painful edit as a sub-collection under a larger collection. I had that familiar sinking feeling in my stomach when I thought I'd accidentally removed most of it from the collection. In fact all was OK but I was wondering if there would've been any way back. I don't think there's an 'undo' but could I recreate that collection or just list its members from a backup?

David Hoffman

[Bob Russell]

Hello David,

Photo Mechanic's Collections are part of the Catalog.  There is no option to restore part of the Catalog.  If you do need to restore the Catalog from a backup, then I recommend using the Forget Catalog option in the Catalog Maintenance dialog on the current Catalog before restoring the Catalog from a recent backup. You will need to use the Reintegrate forgotten Catalog once the backup Catalog has replaced the current Catalog. This will restore Photo Mechanic's Catalog back to the state when the last backup was run.

Best regards,

--Bob

[DavidHoffmanuk]

Thanks Bob.

That would get me the old collection back but at the cost of losing the work done since it was deleted.

Would it be possible to restore the backup catalog, perhaps under a different name or on a different drive, and then have both versions available so that I could open the collection on the backup, add a keyword and then find them on the current catalog?

David

[Bob Russell]

Hi David,

I have not tried opening two versions of the same catalog yet so I'm not sure what problems ( if any ) you might experience.  I would like to try this workflow on my test machines first, before I can recommend it.

Best regards,

--Bob

[DavidHoffmanuk]

Hi Bob

I would also much rather you tried this on one of your test machines first! I'm on a 2012 Mac Pro stuck at 10.14.6.

David

[Bob Russell]

Hi David,

I was able to test out a couple of attempts to recover a collection or sub collection from a backup.  Neither attempt worked. I tried opening both catalogs at the same time but Photo Mechanic will close the main catalog when you open the backup catalog. It will close the backup catalog when you try to re-open the main catalog.  My second attempt was to open the backup catalog and then open the missing collection from the main catalog. Then I closed the backup catalog and opened the main catalog. I created the missing Collection and then selected the images still opened in the contact sheet, from the backup catalog. When I tried to use the Add to Collection option, Photo Mechanic popped up an error "Preloading Metadata has failed and the operation has been cancelled".  It looks like the best solution is to backup more often and be careful when right-clicking on any of your Collection names.

Best regards,

--Bob

[DavidHoffmanuk]

Thanks for trying Bob. I think you have found a couple of ways to restore the collection. With the backup catalog open I could export the collection's file names & use them to search the current catalog & rebuild the collection.

A better way might be to add a unique keyword to all the files using the backup collection, close that catalog, open the current one and search for that keyword. Do you think that would work?

I do back up daily but an accidental deletion may not be noticed for some time. Being more careful while I work would certainly be a better solution but, after more than 50 years in photography I'm not optimistic...

David