danconley.net

I’ve been struggling with how to handle my laptop. I want all my music on it, but I’d also like to upgrade to Leopard and use Boot Camp to play the Sims games I got at Circuit City last week during their sale. I decided on Sunday to get an external USB hard drive to store my music on, and then change the location of my iTunes library. As an added bonus, I can partition off 80 gigs to use for Time Machine once I upgrade (which will hopefully be in the next few days, depending on when I can get to the store).

With moving, copying and backing up over the past week, there were a few times when I overtaxed my Macbook and did things I probably shouldn’t have. I’d be running late leaving work, so instead of waiting for it to finish its FileVault stuff I’d ‘fat finger’ it (apparently that’s what it’s called when you hold down the power button?). Generally this is ok, but sometimes I lose some of my preferences.

I imported the 200+ pictures I took at the Toronto Zoo yesterday into iPhoto, and then noticed the bottom of the window said ‘227 pictures.’ The rest of them were gone. I checked in Finder and they were still there, thankfully, but not showing up in iPhoto. I did some searching and found how to rebuild your library, but that didn’t work. Since it wasn’t on an external drive, deleting the /Volumes data wouldn’t work either.

Eventually I realized that I had screwed up. I had a backup of the library on my external drive, but reformatted it yesterday to make a partition for Time Machine. Before I did, I copied that library’s AlbumData.xml (which I think was right) to my desktop. That was smart — it’s obviously not a problem with the pictures themselves — except it’s not the right file. I actually needed Library6.iPhoto, which is now long gone.

So, it looks like it’s time to manually re-import the library. I haven’t done any tagging, which is good, but I did rotate a bunch of photos, and I may have to do that again. All things considered I got off lucky, sure, but as I was already looking at needing to browse through the 200 from the zoo and rotate/delete… bah.

Make backups, kids. Another reason why I need to get Leopard post-haste.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 9:19 am and is filed under I am an Apple fanboy, Personal. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.