moved folders to a subfolder, lost all files

[eschmidt]

I'm running PM 5.0, build 18729 on OS X El Capitan, 10.11.6.

In the Navigator panel, I opened a folder (Final Edits) and selected about 60 jpeg images to move to a subfolder (fb). I used the File > Copy/Move function within the program and selected to move them to a created subfolder called fb. It appeared to have did this successfully -- or at least I thought so. I did not get any error messages, but did not open the fb folder immediate and check. Next, I opened another folder (Culled) and selected about 60 .NEF files to move to a new folder (realwedding). Followed the same process and that also appeared to have transferred successful, although again, I did not open the folder yet to verify. About the same time, I was having issues with Lightroom being very sluggish, so I decided to quit and restart. After restarting the program,  it was still sluggish, so I rebooted the entire computer. LR closed quickly, but Photo Mechanic went to a non-responsive state so I had to force quit. Furthermore, when doing a shutdown, the entire computer was hanging on shutting down. I let it go for quite awhile and eventually had to do a force shutdown with the power button, and then manually restarted.

Upon restart, I opened PM again to start working with the files and now I can see the created subfolders in PM (realwedding and fb), but there are no files in them. Additionally, when navigating to the original folders (Culled and Final Edits), the images that I moved are not in those folders as if they had been moved successfully. When I look in Finder, I see the realwedding folder on the hard drive but there are no images in the folder. And when looking in the Final Edits folder, there is no fb folder. These folders / files reside on an external hard drive.

I have the option for View > "Unknown files as proxies" checked (incase that made a difference), but still nothing.

Any ideas what could have happened and how to recover the files? I'm not as concerned about the missing .jpegs from the fb folder, but more-so about the .NEF files.

See attachments as needed. Thanks.

[Hayo Baan]

This sounds bad and the fact that things “felt sluggish” while they normally don't indicates some (hopefully temporary) system failure. I'm quite certain PM uses standard OS file system calls to perform file moves and if PM didn't report an error, the file system didn't report an error. However, given the new directory doesn't appear to contain the files, something did go wrong...

Have you already run Disk Utility's First Aid on the drive? Perhaps that will help.

[Kirk Baker]

This sounds bad and the fact that things “felt sluggish” while they normally don't indicates some (hopefully temporary) system failure. I'm quite certain PM uses standard OS file system calls to perform file moves and if PM didn't report an error, the file system didn't report an error. However, given the new directory doesn't appear to contain the files, something did go wrong...

Have you already run Disk Utility's First Aid on the drive? Perhaps that will help.

I second that and I'd like to see your Photo Mechanic log.  In Photo Mechanic go to the Help menu and choose "Reveal Support Data..." and moments later a Finder window will come forward with the zipped log file selected.  Use the 'Attachments and other options' link when you're composing your reply to this message and there you'll be able to upload your zipped PM log file.

Thanks,

-Kirk

[eschmidt]

Here's the log, attached...I hope I attached the correct one. This activity would have happened on Thursday the 13th, originally.

[Kirk Baker]

Here's the log, attached...I hope I attached the correct one. This activity would have happened on Thursday the 13th, originally.

Unfortunately your log has been truncated and has no entries for Thursday the 13th.  But there are a number of entries on the 14th.  They are errors where certain items that were once available have suddenly disappeared while PM was running.  For instance, this file is repeated hundreds of times:

/Volumes/ESP WEDDINGS/2017/05-2017/5-20 sarah + casey/wedding/RAW/LR Edits/ESP_2838.jpg

Any ideas as to what was going on with that path?

-Kirk

[eschmidt]

That was the current wedding I was editing in Lightroom at the time of reboot on Thursday. I had issues with missing files from that directory as well as this issue in Photo Mechanic. I was trying to deal with both issues all day on Friday. On Thursday when LR was sluggish I tried restarting the program thinking that would help...still sluggish so I rebooted the entire computer. When I decided to do that, LR shut down without issues...although thinking about it, it never asked if I wanted to do a backup, but I do remember it shutting down without locking up. PM was the one that froze and I had to force quit. The entire system then froze on shutdown and I had to force quit. When I restarted, I did get a few errors in LR initially (see attached) when I opened the catalog, but it still let me import photos and keep working on them. However, I noticed that all the edits I did on Wednesday did not save the metadata, along with a large chunk of jpgs that I had exported on Wednesday were also missing from that LR Edits directory. Thus, I had to re-edit a large chunk (basically, everything I worked on for Tuesday night and all day Wednesday). I spent Friday re-editing all of Tues/Wed's progress. My only thought was when the computer froze on shutdown and I manually killed it --- would it have been trying to write / save some sort of data and it was wiped out when I did that??? The metadata and jpg files should have been wrote to the external HD before I even tried to shutdown though, so I don't know why those would then be deleted from the drive on shutdown.

When I look for that file right now, it's not in that directory at all. When I had to re-edit all those images, when I would try to export -- there were some that LR said were still present with that file name and I selected to overwrite the image, however there were also a few that resulted in an error message that the file could not be written, so I ended up exporting most of the new edits to a secondary folder (LR Edits2). I did look up the .NEF file for this particular image and I think it's one I decided to not use upon the second lap of editing....so perhaps I edited it the first time around and then when I had to re-edit I skipped it so that's why it's not showing in any of my LR Edit or LR Edits2 folder now....

The missing folder, missing .NEF files, and missing jpgs that I asked about in the initial forum question are on that drive, but not related to that path at all. The only connection they had is that they're on the same drive and that the change/s were performed that same morning before shutdown. I haven't found any other missing files from that drive....only the work that was performed on Tues and Wed, leading up to Thursday's reboot.

[Hayo Baan]

I don't fully follow what went wrong, but everything you describe indicates some serious system issues. I suggest you do a complete systems check, expecially of your (external) hard drives. Also, have you or haven't you found the missing files already?

[Kirk Baker]

I second Hayo's advice and caution you to fix the disk problems before you try to do more work.  Use the Disk Utility application (Applications/Utilities/DiskUtility) and run a "First Aid" on it.  If the same type of behavior arises again, I suggest taking your Mac to someone (Apple Store, or a certified Apple repair location) to have your system checked out.

-Kirk

[eschmidt]

I have not found the files yet. I will run the First Aid check and see how that goes. I ordered another external hard drive and am waiting on that to arrive in a couple days -- was going to backup some of the files on this current external hard drive to the new one and then run the First Aid after that just incase. Thanks.