Lost all edits after catalogue repair

[Etrephotography]

LR had to repair my catalogue and after repairing it every edit I have ever done on tens of thousands of pics has gone. I thought the point of sidecars was that the edits were always with the pic, but either LR has overwritten avery XMP, or its just ignoring them? Really not sure why Abobe cant produce better coding. theyve been doing it for decades?

[Thor Egil Leirtrø]

Go back to yesterdays backup - or as many days back you need to find a working catalogue.

[Ian Lyons]

If you also saved the edits to XMP sidecars, then you need to use 'Read Metadata from file', which can be found under the Library module's 'Metadata' menu. However, before attempting this I suggest you do as @Thor Egil Leirtrø mentioned and use a backup of your catalog.

[JohanElzenga]

Sidecar files have nothing to do with this. Lightroom can write to them if you want to, but it does not use them (unless you choose the 'read metadata from files' menu). Edits are stored in the catalog, so it sounds like the catalog the repair attempt failed. Indeed use a catalog backup.

[Keith Reeder]

"Really not sure why Abobe cant produce better coding. theyve been doing it for decades?

Abobe's coding is fine. But - as anyone with any database knowledge knows - sometimes databases (especially big ones) wig out for no apparent good reason. 

That's why you have back-ups: they're hardly a concept unique to Adobe, so the idea that we're looking at incompetent coding here bears little critical analysis.