Folder from my backup HD vanished!!!

[ralphgmr]

I have a folder with my name on a backup Hard disk and another on my desktop in which I keep the most important things. I bought a new WD with 2 TB around 6 months ago and did a well needed backup of this folder.

On both folders (desktop and WD) I had a subfolder with all my photos. Since I was running low on space on my laptop, I decided to delete the photo folder from the laptop and leave it just on the backup disk since I don't need to look at them all the time.

Time has past and the other day I realised I did quite a few changes on this folder of the desktop, so I thought I would backup it up again. So I copied the same folder to the backup disk. When I did so, I clicked on "Replace".

Today when I checked the hard disk I realised the photo folder is not there. Now googling and reading articles about it, it seems that Mac treats this Replace VERY differently than it does other systems (I work with Windows, Linux and Mac all the time and has been a Windows user for many years). Windows and Linux, by default, usually treats same folders which are being copied to different locations by MERGING them (and that's exactly what I thought MacOs was doing when I clicked on Replace). From what I'm reading now, MacOs simply "deletes" the old and put the new one there without even putting the old in the trash bin (not that this would have helped much, since I cleaned my trash bin many times after that).

I'm someone who has travelled a lot to many different regions on the planet and always carrying a very nice DSLR (and even other cameras, I have now 3 in total) with expensive lenses and has been doing this for many years, so now I'm thinking how should I kill myself, if throwing myself in front of a bus, jumping from a bridge or just simply hanging. Any help, very much appreciated (more on the side of things on how to solve the issue with the files and disk not the killing itself).

Thanks in advance.

p.s.:
Article I found:
(the windows screenshot was the behaviour I was expecting)

http://www.howtogeek.com/198043/how-to-merge-folders-on-mac-os-x-without-losing- all-your-files-seriously/

 

[Fishrrman]

For future backup needs, I'd suggest you try either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper...

 

[Weaselboy]

Any help, very much appreciated

I think you only hope at this point it to try some sort of recovery software like Disk Warrior (not cheap!).

Until you do that, do not use the external drive at all. The more you use the drive the higher the risk of the files being overwritten.

http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/

 

[ralphgmr]

Thanks Weaselboy! Yeah I'm on the process of finding a good recovery software that not gonna cost me a lot. And I know that about the use of the hard disk. Not gonna copy a single file to it till I get these files recovered.

I already scanned with DiskDrill but I'm getting huge files for the CR2 files which he found it (he found a lot of them, so I'm a bit more relieved). But the files now lost the naming and are more than 10x bigger than it suppose to be (I was reading a technical explanation why this happens so I guess I'll have to suck it up and buy a new external drive to process the recovery).

The file naming being differently gonna give me further problems, because I had tons of color treatments done under Lightroom and if he can't find the file name, I don't know how to reconnect the files. I could reconnect one by one, but it's gonna take forever. I have thousands of CR2 files.