Video in iPhoto suddenly corrupted

[TVreporter]

I opened my iPhoto today to show some video taken 2 months ago and suddenly the files are playing large coloured blocks or stripes.

Needless to say my wife is very upset over this as it was important, personal video. It played fine all along. All updates have been done, rebooted the iMac, etc. Seems that video and a few pics of that day are now corrupted. The rest of the iPhoto library appears fine.

Any way to repair this? Would going into time machine backup work? If so, what's the best process.


What could be causing this? Seems to be only video affected.

Please help! 2011 iMac, video was on iPhone5s and iPhoto version 9.5.1


Thanks!

 

[scaredpoet]

Any way to repair this? Would going into time machine backup work? If so, what's the best process.

Time Machine is probably your best bet for recovery at this point. Select your video and use the "show in finder" option to show the actual file. Then, with the finder window in view, start up Time Machine. Go back to the earliest version Time Machine has of your video, and restore it to the present. With any luck, that early backed up version should play okay. If not, it might've been corrupted from the beginning.

What could be causing this? Seems to be only video affected.

Any number of software or hardware errors could have come together to cause this type of corruption. iPhoto might've glitched or crashed, or maybe the transfer between your phone/camera and your Mac went awry. Or the hard drive itself might've had an issue. The generic term for this is data rot, and unfortunately, it happens regardless of your OS or hardware from time to time.

The bad news is, Apple's been criticized for using a file system that doesn't safeguard well against data rot (to be fair, Windows is no better). Though, the good news is, if you're using a backup system like Time Machine, where incremental changes are all recorded and older versions stay backed up, you have a reasonable chance of recovering your corrupted data IF you manage to catch it in time.

Other things you can do: if the photos and videos are being taken from your smartphone (or even if they aren't), you can upload copies to Dropbox (which has an auto-upload option from their app), or any of a bunch of other cloud services. This way you have a copy on your Mac and one in the cloud, and if one copy is lost or curated, you can always restore it from the other.