After upgrade from leopard to lion, all data is lost. Help!

[jenlyd]

I upgraded from leopard (snow, I think) to lion. My iPhoto, Aperture, and iTunes are all empty, as well as my documents. What do I need to do to transfer the files? I thought they would automatically transfer.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

How did you upgrade?
Do you have a backup?
Have you looked at the Pictures and Music folders to see, if your data is still in there?

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[btbrossard]

Is the rest of your data on the drive or is none of your personal documents to be found?

Were all of these items in the default location under Snow Leopard (Macintosh HD\Users\User Name\Documents, Music, Pictures, ect...)?

I would look in those folders under your current user account to see if any of your data is there.

 

[S.B.G]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4S: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Have you tried to restore from a Time Machine backup?

 

[jenlyd]

How did you upgrade?
Do you have a backup?
Have you looked at the Pictures and Music folders to see, if your data is still in there?

To edit your thread title to a descriptive one, just click on the Image button on the bottom right of your original post and then click the Image button below your message.

I upgraded by buying it from the apple store. No, stupidly enough, I don't have a backup.
The folders are empty. The only thing that seems to have transferred is my contacts.

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Is the rest of your data on the drive or is none of your personal documents to be found?

Were all of these items in the default location under Snow Leopard (Macintosh HD\Users\User Name\Documents, Music, Pictures, ect...)?

I would look in those folders under your current user account to see if any of your data is there.

I'm not sure if the items were in default or not. All of the folders are empty except contacts.

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Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4S: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Have you tried to restore from a Time Machine backup?

No. How do I do this?

 

[blueroom]

Always backup your data, it's so easy, inexpensive and invaluable it's hard to imagine not doing it.
If / when your HDD fails you'll be prepared.
* cheap = an external HD

 

[aristobrat]

I upgraded from leopard (snow, I think) to lion.

That's kind of an important point. AFAIK, there is no "upgrade" from Leopard. You have to erase everything entirely and install from scratch. It will upgrade from Snow Leopard though.

If you're not too comfortable with all of this troubleshooting, I would make a reservation at the Genius Bar of the store that you bought the upgrade from and let them see what happened.

 

[mmomega]

So are you sure that you performed an upgrade and not a fresh install by accident?
I've never had any of my OS X upgrades delete data.
It's possible it may have moved it, check to see if you have another user account

 

[jenlyd]

That's kind of an important point. AFAIK, there is no "upgrade" from Leopard. You have to erase everything entirely and install from scratch. It will upgrade from Snow Leopard though.

If you're not too comfortable with all of this troubleshooting, I would make a reservation at the Genius Bar of the store that you bought the upgrade from and let them see what happened.

I think I might do just that. I'm afraid of doing something that will delete everything. It's a lot to lose. Thanks a bunch.

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So are you sure that you performed an upgrade and not a fresh install by accident?
I've never had any of my OS X upgrades delete data.
It's possible it may have moved it, check to see if you have another user account

Yep. Pretty sure it was an upgrade. There are two under my name, one with just first name, and one first and last, but both are empty. There's another listed that is my ex-husband's name, but I can't access that one.

 

[Kubaaw]

Lost files

Happened the same to me. After I installed lion, downloaded from apple store, folder lost my video files. Folder still appeared on a dock, but was empty. I'm running right now Data recovery. I let you know if that helped.