iMac with new hard drive, time machine restore problem

[blownpepper]

Hi All,

I haven't had any luck fixing this problem so far and I thought someone here might be able to help. My iMac had a hard drive problem about a month ago. It had the "white screen of death". After performing the disk repair it worked for enough time for me to perform a time machine backup. A few days after backup, it went back to the white screen of death. As far as I can tell, the backup worked fine and it backed up about 40gb of data, mostly pictures from 1/1/12-5/26/12. After I received my iMac back from the Apple store (with a new hard drive) I loaded the iPhoto folder and there are NO pictures from 2012 on there... However, there is a large lost+found folder on the backup. Could it be that the hard drive was so messed up that all those photos were corrupted or could they be somewhere else?

TIA!

 

[theSeb]

Hi All,

I haven't had any luck fixing this problem so far and I thought someone here might be able to help. My iMac had a hard drive problem about a month ago. It had the "white screen of death". After performing the disk repair it worked for enough time for me to perform a time machine backup. A few days after backup, it went back to the white screen of death. As far as I can tell, the backup worked fine and it backed up about 40gb of data, mostly pictures from 1/1/12-5/26/12. After I received my iMac back from the Apple store (with a new hard drive) I loaded the iPhoto folder and there are NO pictures from 2012 on there... However, there is a large lost+found folder on the backup. Could it be that the hard drive was so messed up that all those photos were corrupted or could they be somewhere else?

TIA!

This might be a stupid question or me not reading properly, but did you do a restore from your time machine backup to your new hard drive?

 

[blownpepper]

Sorry for not clarifying. At the Apple store, they told me that due to the potential hard drive issues, they didn't recommend doing a "restore" from the time machine backup and instead showed me how to copy over the iPhoto album. That's what I did initially and I had no 2012 pictures. After that, I did the restore and it pulled over some (not sure if all) applications that I know I added after 1/1/2012 but it did not pull over any 2012 pictures.

 

[robgendreau]

Have you searched on the backup to see if they're there? You seem to assume so, but have you gone inside the iPhoto Library on the backup to check?

 

[blownpepper]

Thanks for the response. They are not in the backup library but the guy at the Apple store said they'd probably show up after copying the library over to the iMac. When it was backing up, I know it copied around 40gb of something... I was viewing the pics on the iMac while it was backing up. There is a large lost+found file on the backup. Could they be in there? I went through a number of the folders and some of the sub-folders but not all of them. There are many.

My wife will lose it if we've lost all those pics. We've got a 3 and 5 year old....

Help!

Thanks again for any and all responses and ideas!

 

[mfacey]

I'm Not sure about this lost and found life, but given the importance of your valuable files it would be wise to get some form of backup going right away on your currently working machine.
I find it pretty unbelieveable that people are still letting valuable files like family photos sitting on one fault-prone disk drive...