Bobkeenan Photography Just deleted my Aperture library how to recover deleted files

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This post is about how to recover deleted files, in this case Aperture 3 library files.

First…. I am a fairly careful guy with my images. I use them for personal use and for Microstock (helps pay for all this expensive gear). I usually download my images to my laptop after a days shooting. When I get home I process them. Once a month take all the images on my laptop and move them to a hard drive with ALL of my images. Every few months I back up that drive to another drive.

None of that helped me with this.

Just came back from a 30 day vacation and the desktop of my Macbook Pro was a mess and full of useless files. And my hard drive was getting full so I figured I would do some spring cleaning. 15 minutes later my desktop is clean and then I empty the trash.

Now that I have a clean looking desktop I know it would be good to start processing those 400 images ( took thousands but these were whittled down to the best). Those images included some of the best I have ever taken like this one:

But…. I deleted my Aperture Library!

I opened Aperture and NOTHING was there…. NO Library of images. OMG….. I trashed the library of images.

I went through the seven stages of bad news:

– Shock or Disbelief – Wait it had to be somewhere else….. Nope – Denial – This is rediculous…..There is no way I deleted it…..Keep looking – Anger – GD IT !!!! – Bargaining —- Not sure I did this one – Guilt – I don’t deserve to be a Photographer – Depression – This is so sad I can’t stand it – Acceptance and Hope – Wait maybe there is a way.

So I did a bunch in internet research. Now this is mostly MAC based but some of these programs have PC counterparts. I checked out Disk Warrior , Data Rescue III , Disk Drill , and a few others. I looked for reviews and they were all over the place. Most of this software will allow a free download that will discover the trashed files but then you have to pay to RECOVER the files. I found Disk Drill to be one of the betters. I found that they all found the same files. And the recoveries were similar. I picked Disk Drill because it allow for some filtering of the results like, when deleted, file size, chance of recover, type of file. Make sure that you have an external drive connected or another partition. You will want to cease and desist from any downloading to your main boot drive. This is because every time you add more data, like a download, you could be writing over one of those precious images.

So I ran the programs. I recovered about 900 image files!!! That was the good news. The bad news is that about 50% of the files were corrupted with only part of the images showing. The other issue is that many of files were images that I had rejected over the past year for lack of image quality. So it took HOURS to go through all of the images and sort out the the images.

In the end I got about 300 of the 400 images back. Most of my best ones were recovered.

Then I had another brilliant idea….. could many of the images still be on my CF data cards. The problem there is that I erase and reformat them after every use. I ran disk drill on them as well and found a lot of earlier shots that were part of my laptop yet-to-be-loaded microstock images.

Moral of the Story

1. Don’t keep you library or folder of images on your desktop where it is easy to drag to the trash

2. Do not go into depression…. you probably can recover many of those images.

Girault October 31, 2012 Hi guys, I lost all my images in my Aperture Library I found your blog and so bought Disk Drill They found a lot of things and almost RAW files but now i cannot open this RAW The image is really not good or Photoshop tells me that it does not recognize this type of file (cr2). CAN you help me please? Thank you so much in advance Scarlett Reply bobbyk October 31, 2012 First…. dont add any more files to your computer. They will erase your deleted files. How did you lose the library? I am not sure why PS is not recognizing your lost files. If they are too corrupted that may be an answer. But if your loss is recent and you have not added a lot more files then those files should still be there. Did you try opening the recovered files in Aperture or in the Canon DP software. I would try that. In my case I had added several files and while I was able to get and see almost all of the files back about 20% of them were corrupted and only partial images. Reply

Hi guys,

I lost all my images in my Aperture Library I found your blog and so bought Disk Drill They found a lot of things and almost RAW files but now i cannot open this RAW The image is really not good or Photoshop tells me that it does not recognize this type of file (cr2). CAN you help me please?

Thank you so much in advance Scarlett

bobbyk October 31, 2012 First…. dont add any more files to your computer. They will erase your deleted files. How did you lose the library? I am not sure why PS is not recognizing your lost files. If they are too corrupted that may be an answer. But if your loss is recent and you have not added a lot more files then those files should still be there. Did you try opening the recovered files in Aperture or in the Canon DP software. I would try that. In my case I had added several files and while I was able to get and see almost all of the files back about 20% of them were corrupted and only partial images. Reply

First…. dont add any more files to your computer. They will erase your deleted files. How did you lose the library? I am not sure why PS is not recognizing your lost files. If they are too corrupted that may be an answer. But if your loss is recent and you have not added a lot more files then those files should still be there. Did you try opening the recovered files in Aperture or in the Canon DP software. I would try that. In my case I had added several files and while I was able to get and see almost all of the files back about 20% of them were corrupted and only partial images.

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