External drive contents stored on HD volume???

[hauntedcity]

I'm not quite sure HOW this happened, but here is WHAT happened...

- I have an external USB drive hooked up to an Airport Extreme Base Station called "AirDisk"

- Several weeks ago, I loaded over 6,000 photos into a new iPhoto library on the external drive. (I held down Option when opening iPhoto and created a library on "AirDisk")

- I religiously back up the external drive (good boy, me!)

- I checked the external drive today and found NO photos - The iPhoto Library folder is empty. I check iPhoto and everything is still there.

Hmmmm...

After doing a little hunting and playing in Terminal (mmmm... UNIX), I discovered a volume on my internal hard drive called "Airdisk-1", and my entire iPhoto library (17+ GB) was located here.

So, what the heck happened? Why did all my photos get loaded on this "Airdisk-1" volume, which I did not even create, rather than the external "Airdisk" drive?

All this exciting stuff has happened on a new-ish MBP (2.16 GHz).

Thanks,
Doug

 

[Dimwhit]

What app are you using to back up to the external hard drive, and which settings (if applicable) do you use?

 

[hauntedcity]

What app are you using to back up to the external hard drive, and which settings (if applicable) do you use?

I don't think the backup has anything to do with it, since the source drive didn't have a photo library to back up (although all other files were backed up correctly). For the record, I was using .mac backup to another external drive.

What I really don't understand is how this Volume (not even really sure what that is, since it just looks like a folder on my hard drive) called "AirDisk-1" got created with the same name as an external drive with a "-1" suffix. The Volume folder also contains an alias to the external drive called "Airdisk".

Confused smilie to visualize my confusion:

 

[Dimwhit]

I'm taking a big shot in the dark...I was just wondering if the backup utility was moving what was currently an the airdisk back to your main drive so it could have full access to the airdisk drive to perform the backup.

But I've never heard of that happening before. So I just don't know. Sorry.

 

[hauntedcity]

I'm taking a big shot in the dark...I was just wondering if the backup utility was moving what was currently an the airdisk back to your main drive so it could have full access to the airdisk drive to perform the backup.

But I've never heard of that happening before. So I just don't know. Sorry.

That's okay. I'm good at mucking things up.

So, what exactly are "Volumes"? I thought it would be something like a list of all drives, but that doesn't appear to be quite right.

 

[Dimwhit]

That's okay. I'm good at mucking things up.

So, what exactly are "Volumes"? I thought it would be something like a list of all drives, but that doesn't appear to be quite right.

A 'Volume' is sort of a drive. If you partition a drive in two, it would show up as two Volumes. A network drive would be a volume. I think an inserted CD would show up as a volume. I believe a volume is considered as a single mounted 'thing' (hd, cd, networked computer, etc.).