Had two hard drives and one crashed losing those photos

Report · Dec 25, 2024

Hello community, I'm needing some help. Years ago I had two dedicated hard drives for my photos. One of them crashed leaving the photos it held gone forever. I have since upgraded my backup work flow. I recently found an old shoe box that had a backup of my catalogs over the years and I believe some of my lost images will be found on these burned DVD's. Problem is, I don't know what to do to get them back. I use APE 2022. Do I go to "Restore Cataglog"? I don't want to loose what I currently have as it's been years of new photos being added to my catalog since the loss of that drive. I haven't found a good solution in the community discussions and hoping someone can help talk me through this.

Report · Feb 14, 2025

To me, the most logical approach would be to find the latest backup that was created before the hard disk crash.

If the photo files still existed at that time, they will be restored.
If the files were first stored on your hard drive after that backup was created, they will obviously not be found.
There is no point to restoring other backups unless you are not sure when they were created.

Report · Mar 13, 2025

@Greg_S. your advice has been so valuable and I have been able to restore many old photos. Thank you so much!

I have a couple of follow up questions from this process.

1. Before I did any restore processes, I zipped and then copied my catalog file from my internal C drive to a hard drive, unzipped it, and had it available in case anything went wrong. Thankfully the restores went well and I didn't need to use it. My question is, should I keep this catalog file on my external drive (Elements is still backing up to the original location on my 'C')? Where is the recommeneded location to keep the cataloge file?

2. I restored a half a dozen TLY Files and I believe I saved one of the TLY Files incorrectly because now when I open my drive I have thousands of Bxxx.XMP files which have to populate before I can access any folders. My question is, can I move these .XMP files, can I delete them, do I need to delete the Restore Backup and do it again? (I have provided a couple of screenshots of what my folder tree looks like)

3. Do I need to keep any of the Restore Backups if I got what I needed from working through that process?

4. Do I need to keep any of the Backup.tly files if I got what I needed from the restore process?

Report · Mar 13, 2025

I'm glad I was able to help you restore your lost photos. 8)

1. As you have already experienced, a hard drive crash can wipe out your precious photos and videos. So, in my view, you can never have enough backups of relevant files. I'm not sure whether you are talking about zipping the catalog.psexxdb file or the entire catalog folder. Either way they are valuable assets to have as long as you have the storage space. And obviously as you continue developing your catalog, you should copy/backup the latest versions too. The catalog file/folder can be stored anywhere, as long as you know where to find it when needed. As for your working catalog, it is probably best to keep it in the default location on an internal hard drive, particularly if it is an SSD drive. Do not keep it on a NAS because you may suffer performance issues.

2. The xmp files are probably related to your raw files and they store information regarding any edits you have made to the raw files. These files should not be on the root of your M drive and I would delete all of these B000xx jpg and raw files and the associated .xmp files. Or better yet, move them all to a new folder which is where they should have been in the first place.

3. See my response to question 1. You can never have too many backups.

4. The backup.tly files are essential for the backup to work. If you delete that file, you might as well delete the entire backup.