Skip to main content
GreenChair
GreenChair
Participant
May 2, 2020
Question

Will my photos in Bridge disappear if I reset my Mac to factory settings?

  • May 2, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 409 views

Will my photos in Bridge disappear if I reset my Mac to factory settings?

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

gary_sc
Community Expert
gary_scCommunity Expert
Community Expert
May 2, 2020

If that's going to erase your hard drive than probably yes. If it just sets your operating system to its original configuration leaving everything else in place than probably no. 

 

However, I do see a potentially bigger problem: is your computer backed up? At a minimum, you should take advantage of Time Machine: you plug a large-ish external drive to your Mac and it back up every hour for 24 hours, then dayly (if there are changes), etc. Among the jewels of this is if you are working on a project and write over an older version of a document, you can get back that older version. In this case, IF the reset lost all of your images, they'd be on the external drive.

Please keep in mind that there are two kinds of computer users: those who've had a hard drive crash and those who haven't had a hard drive crash yet!

 

Good luck!

    GreenChair
    GreenChairAuthor
    Participant
    May 2, 2020

    Thank you Gary. I appreciate your reply so much. I will do a back up on my Time Machine before I reset to factory settings. This is what I was told to do since my computer is so bogged down. It scares me. 

    gary_sc
    Community Expert
    gary_scCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 2, 2020

    Hi GreenChair,

     

    One other thing to ask: how much free space does your computer have? How large is your hard drive and how much stuff is on it.

     

    One of the causes of a bogged down system is not enough free space. If you have (say) gobs and gobs of photos, than an easy solution is to get those onto an external hard drive (which also means that you should do what I do which is to have two external hard drives, one is used to place all of your photos and other documents, then a 2nd external drive to back up the first one. Yeah, it's all part of hoping that none of them crash. FWIW, I do that AND I also subscribe to a cloud service that backs me up to the clouds in case of fire. So yeah, I'm covered.

    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
    Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices