HELP!! External hard drive got chewed...cant open source files

[yjhollenbeck]

Hi all. So my dog ate my external hard drive and now when I open the catalog I can't do anything with the photos as it says the source files are missing. I don't know Lightroom enough to know if theres any place else I can look for these files or if I have to contact the maker of the external hard drive. HELP!!!!

[dj_paige]

You could restore the photos from their backups.

If you don't have backups, then I think you are not going to be able to recover your photos.

[yjhollenbeck]

Thank you....how do I do that? I do do the backups!!

[dj_paige]

Since you can copy the backups to a destroyed hard drive, you probably want to get a new hard drive, name it the same as the old one (Mac) or give it the same drive letter (Windows), and then just copy (not move) the backups to the new drive, and put the photos in the exactly same folder hierarchy under the exact same parent folder as they were in before.

[JoeKostoss]

yjhollenbeck  wrote

Thank you....how do I do that? I do do the backups!!

Do you mean the Lightroom Backups?  If so, this only backs up the Lightroom Catalog, not the photos.

Do you backup the photos (a separate operation outside of Lightroom) from the EHD to another location such as a 2nd EHD or to an on-line backup service?  If not, you might try a service (such as the Geek Squad at Best Buy to try to rescue your images.  Depending on the severity of the damage, they may or may not be able to rescue the images.  Either way, it could be expensive.

[Theresa J]

What is your operating system? If you have a Mac, do you run time machine for backups? If the external drive was connected to your computer while time machine ran, you will have backups of the images.