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Old 07-26-2008, 09:15 PM
JohnTynes JohnTynes is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2008
Posts: 4
Why is iPhoto using backup library as main library?

Today my wife noticed that recent pictures had disappeared from our iPhoto library (Mac OS X 10.4.11, iPhoto 6.06). On investigation, I determined that iPhoto had started using our SuperDuper backup volume's copy of the iPhoto library instead of the real one. So our last round of photos were imported onto the backup volume, and then SuperDuper erased them from the backup volume when it did Smart Backup with the master volume, which didn't have them.

I verified this by unmounting the backup volume and launching iPhoto, which then complained that it could not find the library. I pointed it to the master volume and then it loaded properly.

Any idea how could this have happened? Unlike iTunes, iPhoto 6 doesn't even let the user specify where the library is stored via Preferences, so there's no way we set this ourselves. Somehow, iPhoto found the library on our backup volume and decided that was the canonical one. This only happened recently, as photos from June are still present.

The sad result is that we lost the last month of pictures of our five-month-old baby. Is there any way of unerasing files from the backup volume to get them back?
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