External drive has failed

[chrisv65852847]

My external drive has failed. Luckily I have a backup of all the photos. I put it back on another external hard drive. What is the best and fastest way to make them visible in Lightroom? Import or sync? Or is there another (quick) possibility. It's almost 1 Tb.

Greeting Chris van Dijke

[dj_paige]

Import or sync?

Neither of these is a good thing to do, they are the wrong things to do and would make things worse.

Since you said you have the backups of the photos on another hard drive, you rename this other hard drive to be the same as the hard drive that failed. Then open your LrC catalog. (That may still result in question mark icons on your folders, in which case the solution is here, see Figure 4 in particular)

[JohanElzenga]

My external drive has failed. Luckily I have a backup of all the photos. I put it back on another external hard drive. What is the best and fastest way to make them visible in Lightroom? Import or sync? Or is there another (quick) possibility. It's almost 1 Tb.

By @chrisv65852847

It couldn't be easier. Just rename the new drive and give it the exact same name also the old drive had. Lightroom Classic won't know the difference.

[chrisv65852847]

I had disconnected the broken drive because Lightroom had become slow. I turned it back on and linked the missing root folder to the other drive, it works now. The newly linked drive already contained photos that were already known in Lightroom. So I couldn't give the new hard drive the name of the broken drive. But in the end, it's not necessary Thank you for your help.