Recovering a missing file - Lightroom

I have a shoot where there is a ton of missing photos on my external hard drive. Here's the story...

I imported a ton of images from multiple shoots from the SD card to the external Samsung SSD T1 hard drive. Somewhere after that I've made some changes to some of the images on the drive through lightroom. I went back to try to finalize the edits today and found that the files were missing. About 300 images in total. The majority of one shoot. The XMP files are all there but the RAW's are gone. I've searched through the SSD manually, checked my two computers (macbook pro and built PC) and haven't found anything.

Any way to recover something from the XMP's? Even a preview in a lower resolution... I had a lot of things fail here, my time machine backup didn't hit the external drive. I manually backed it up on my built PC but that seems to be after the files went missing as everything from image 31 to 300 is not on there or the external...

Figured I'd check with the collective mind of POTN before I bit the bullet and told a good customer that I lost his whole shoot. Thanks!

No, XMPs and the parallel catalog entries are nothing more than fancy text files which list the edits you will want done when the Raw images are rendered as RGB images and exported. However, if the missing Raws were imported into Lightroom, LR would have made previews - low res (unless you made 1:1 previews) Adobe RGB jpgs which can be recovered with this plugin:
http://regex.info …oodies/preview-extraction

Thanks for the help! While it's not ideal like recovering the raws, it did help me get 1440x960 images which aren't the best but it's better than the alternative which is nothing.

The images were imported and minor changes were made from the beginning. No idea why they are missing. The drive never leaves my possession and its password protected but I've been having some issues with it docking and undocking from my computers. It won't register sometimes on the pc and other times it won't eject from my Mac. I think the drive has some issues and the data is not completely safe.

Since I was importing to my laptop with minimal onboard storage, I couldn't immeadiately back up the images and it seems to be my undoing in this particular situation. I guess it's time for a better workflow.

Thanks again!

Don't you still have the originals on the SD card?

Nope, It was during holiday shoots for kids. I had 20 families in 6 days with a pair of 32GB cards. I was erasing every 5th shoot or so after uploading to my computer and verifying that the images were there. Thanks for the suggestion though!

Aww....that's too bad.

We recently found (on Amazon) Sony 32GB Class 10 UHS-1 SD cards for under $10. We bought a bunch. We never delete anything off the SD cards anymore.

After downloading the images to the computer, did you make a second copy anywhere? Before I format my cards, I make sure I have at least two copies first.

Typically I do, but in this case I didn't. When I'm working on my laptop I have a main drive on the macbook of 256gb. Not too large so I don't store pictures on there. I have an external drive which has my lightroom catalog on it. I save the images to there which allows me to edit on the go. If I only have my laptop I can edit on there. If I'm at home on my desktop PC I can edit there. It allows me to be mobile but the storage is limiting. I assumed everything was good when I saw the images in lightroom and I made minor edits. I think that I'm going to look into some sort of a network NAS storage system or maybe a dropbox account that would allow me to store larger files in the cloud in the future so I don't run into this situation again.

And buy more cards! Reformatting a card is like throwing away the film negatives. Especially for PAYING jobs. Cards can't be much smaller or cheaper these days.

You may be able to remove the external drive from the enclosure and mount it via an adapter or install directly into a PC. The issue may be with the control board or connectors on the external drive, and not the drive itself. If you have been having problems mounting and unmounting the drive, I'd give it a try.

Thanks for the idea. I'm probably not going to do it as it is a small SSD drive that wouldn't be mountable internally. Honestly if there was an issue with the drive, Samsung should stand behind it. I paid a lot of money to have an SSD external drive and for it to be a little questionable in mounting/unmounting is unacceptable to me.

I like where your heads at though, good idea!