Folder disappeared

[josephd7994298]

I have been using LR over 10 years. I am using LR Classic 9.2.  I keep all of photos on external hard drives.

2 days ago I discovered that all of the photos from the entire year of 2016 were wiped off of my HD though they still were in my LR catalog.

I was able to recover all of the photos from a back up drive but I had to re-import month by month back in to LR.

I don't think this is a LR problem and nothing like this has ever happened before.

Does anybody have any thoughts about what may have caused this problem?

Many thanks

[JohanElzenga]

First of all, you should not have imported these photos again. They were still in Lightroom, so you should have 'reconnected' them: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom-photos-missing-fix/

I also do not think this is a Lightroom issue. I have never heard any issue where Lightroom would delete images from disk, but keep the reference to them in the catalog. I have no idea what could have happened (apart from user error, of course), but I think that your experience illustrates how important backups are.

[josephd7994298]

Thank you

[Just Shoot Me]

QUOTE:

Does anybody have any thoughts about what may have caused this problem?

END QUOTE:

Yes that drive is starting to fail.

Yes someone that has access to your computer either accidentally or on purpose Deleted them and then Emptied the trash/recycle bin.

[josephd7994298]

And that is the weird thing, they were not in the trash.  So it sounds like a HD issue.  FYI, a one year old G Tech raid.

[Just Shoot Me]

Anything can fail at any time.

The key data retention is redundancy.

Yes some RAID systems are supposed to do that automatically.