Lightroom failed external drive

Question

So I recently started traveling and had to opt for many more portable solutions. I was/am on the hunt for better solutions. Though this is very fresh and new, so I thought I had some time to use this set up and play with it to figure out exactly what my needs and wants are in a more practical solution.

Here is my setup - 2015 Macbook (the tiny one with only use USB C port) running on OSX 10.11.6 El Capitan; USB 3 hub with SD slot; 2 x Seagate 2TB external HDD; Lightroom 6;

Here is my issue - My external HDD with the photos in lightroom, lightroom database and catalogue file(s) on it is no longer mounting when I plug it in.

Series of events leading up to it - The other day I was importing my photos from my SD card to Lightroom and it threw an error about a quarter of the way through. I'm sorry I didn't catch the exact error as I was sorta on the run and didn't think to take better note. Basically it did not finish importing the photos. Lightroom was still running and functional. So I tried re-importing the images. It got further but did the same thing again. So I tried a third time and it didn't even make it to the first one. The external hard drive was no longer reachable.

Here is what I have tried - I unplugged and replugged it back in. It would not even register. I restarted, still could not recognize it. So I tried with just a USB to USB C adapter and not through the port. It still would not recognize it. After many attempts at open DiskUtil to run first aid on it, I stuck it in the freezer and it actually worked after about half an hour. I did not have any other computers to test it on. Though I attempted to run a virtual Linux environment to see if it helped, because they are typically better than mac's at reading external HDD's. I did not get it fully running before I was able to get it working after freezing it. I had to run, so I just crossed my fingers it would hold out until I had more time and internet connection to back this up to something like amazon s3.

Some additional things I can note which may be helpful to know. I have the exact same external hard drive I use for some other storage, and it has no issues through the hub or directly plugged in (with a USB C adapter). Also, "sometimes" I can plug in the hard drive that is giving me issues, and though it does not show up in Finder or Mount to the Desktop, I can open up Terminal and run diskutil list and it shows up. But when trying to manually mount it via diskutil mount /dev/diskN it just hangs.

My Question - I still have lightroom open and running. In fear of closing it and not saving the work I've done. Is there something I can do save the work loaded in lightroom? Maybe plug in my second hard drive that is working and tell it to recreate a new lightroom database file from it's in memory state? (I don't know exactly how lightroom works or if that is possible).

Further Question - Do any of you have recommendations on steps to take once this is recovered to not end up in the same situation again? Maybe further reading? Anything? Also, under the circumstances I am not able to make any kind of recover from this failed hard drive, what is the recommended path to reconcile any work or minimize my lossage? For example: is my still currently open running lightroom able to produce a new database file in a new location?

Answer 1

I expect that you'll get a "Lightroom encountered an error ..." message and it will want to quit - it doesn't offer an option to save the catalogue database to alternative storage.

If the Mac sees the disk, but can't mount it try repairing it in DiskUtility - if that fails, I've been successful at recovering corrupted HFS+ volumes using TestDisk

A second copy (local or cloud) is helpful for recovery in the event of catastrophic disk failure, but don't confuse it with a real backup solution (the operation of updating a "backup" copy is almost certainly going propagate hidden problems to the backup copy (e.g. deleted or corrupted files)).

If you have the upload bandwidth, a cloud backup solution (I use Crashplan) is the best option, but it does need very decent bandwidth and doesn't work if you switch your machine off (very rough figures: 1Mbit/s up is 10s/MB, so 10000s/GB … roughly rounded up 3 hours/GB … 1TB would take 3000 hours … 125 days (24x7)).

In terms of LR, I'd always recommend enabling the "Automatically write changes into XMP" - the possible performance hit is worth it for the safety net of recovering metadata in the event of corrupting the catalog.

Answer 2

I can help with the disk recovery part as I helped a friend with a similar issue a few months ago.

I ended up putting the external drive on a Linux box and using ddrescue against the drive to aggressively try to recover the whole drive. This could take days. You'll need 2TB of free space somewhere to write the disk image. I used the commmand:

ddrescue -vv -d -S /dev/sdX image.out image.log

where sdX is your drive's path on Linux.

In my case I still had an unmountable image, so I then ran PhotoRec against the recovered image to recover the images:

PhotoRec searches for known file headers. If there is no data fragmentation, which is often the case, it can recover the whole file. PhotoRec recognizes and recovers numerous file formats including ZIP, Office, PDF, HTML, JPEG and various graphics file formats. The whole list of file formats recovered by PhotoRec contains more than 480 file extensions (about 300 file families).

This will not recover your Lightroom DB, as I am sure it is fragmented.

Prevention? As someone mentioned in another answer, also save the XMP's along with the images, and I give a very hearty 2nd recommendation for CrashPlan. They even have a free option where you backup to your own remote system -- although you really should have an "offsite" backup as well in case of fire, flooding, or theft.

Note: Looks like both ddrescue and photorec are also able to be run directly on MacOS

Answer 3

I can only really help with the further question part.

I also run a 2015 MacBook with Lightroom for when I'm on the road. I keep the catalog file locally on the MacBook, but back it up weekly to an external hard drive. I also use Time Machine to back up the MacBook.

Answer 4

The good news is that if you don't hear any grinding, the data on disk is probably okay. The bad news is that recovering the data probably won't be cheap.

There's a small possibility that the problem is with the USB enclosure rather than the hard drive itself, in which case if you open the enclosure, remove the hard drive, and put it in a different USB enclosure, it might work.

Unfortunately, it's probably a cold solder joint somewhere on the actual drive's circuit board, in which case the repair isn't something you can readily do yourself, though if you can figure out what part needs to be cooled down, you might be able to use aerosol freon or similar every minute or two to keep that part cold enough to keep it running long enough to pull the data off of it.