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Time Machine & iPhoto - Best Way To Recover

B

braeburn

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 23, 2006
70
0
Hello All,

A few years ago, I moved my iPhoto library to an external drive as the hard drive on my iMac isn't large enough to store all the pictures we have. I have setup Time Machine to backup that drive along with the iMac to a second hard drive specifically used for Time Machine.

This morning, the iphoto hard drive crashed and looks to be unrecoverable though I haven't tried anything else other than powering that drive off/on.

My question is, since the iphoto library was on the crashed hard drive, do I need to replace it with a new drive and link the library to it before I have Time Machine load those pictures to the new drive or is there another way/method of retrieving the pictures from time machine?

FYI, two weeks ago, I had cloned the iMac using CCC though unsure if it cloned the external drive with our pictures...

Thanks in advance...
 
First, run Disk Utility on the external drive. You can't know it's unrecoverable simply by powering the drive off/on.

If Disk Utility says the drive is unrecoverable, you might still try an erase/reformat of the drive and then restore the contents of the drive from Time Machine. You may prefer to replace it with a new drive anyway.

You want to restore the iPhoto Library as a single item. First you restore, then you link to it from iPhoto (open iPhoto, choose Switch to Library... from the File menu, and select the restored library).

While there are ways to get your photos out of the library, the only reason you might have to do that is if the library itself was damaged beyond repair - so far, there's no hint of that.
 
ApfelKuchen said:
First, run Disk Utility on the external drive. You can't know it's unrecoverable simply by powering the drive off/on.

If Disk Utility says the drive is unrecoverable, you might still try an erase/reformat of the drive and then restore the contents of the drive from Time Machine. You may prefer to replace it with a new drive anyway.

You want to restore the iPhoto Library as a single item. First you restore, then you link to it from iPhoto (open iPhoto, choose Switch to Library... from the File menu, and select the restored library).

While there are ways to get your photos out of the library, the only reason you might have to do that is if the library itself was damaged beyond repair - so far, there's no hint of that.
Click to expand...


The external drive never loads for me to try the Disk Utility, looks like its toast...

Guess I'll need to get a new drive and link the library to it so it copies over and all are there, hopefully...
 
braeburn -

I would NEVER, EVER use TM for backing up an EXTERNAL drive to a second external drive.
I WOULD use CCC every time.
Do it this way, and the backup will be an exact copy of the original drive, finder-mountable.

I would use TM -ONLY- to keep a "running copy" of the internal boot drive.
But I never use TM, and never will use it.
I trust everything I have to CCC, and it hasn't let me down.
I've seen plenty of posts right here on macrumors from people who have been let down by TM in a "moment of extreme need" ...

My opinion only.
Others will disagree.
Some will disagree vehemently.
 
I appreciate everyone's suggestions/recommendations and will figure the setup once I'm able to retrieve all of our photos, so would like to get help with the issue/topic...

Since the iphoto library was on the crashed ext hd, my questions are:

1. I know I can move the iphoto library link to a newer ext drive, when I go to restore to it via time machine, will it have an issue since the original link was on the crashed drive?

2. Is there a way to restore only the iphoto backup to the newer drive?

Appreciate the help as always...
 
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