Recovering from lost edits event

Yesterday I fell victim to the random database corruption that means that all On1 edits vanish along with list of catalogued files and albums.

I have managed to get things back working again quite quickly and am sharing two ways that might allow anyone else in the situation to also get things back where they were.

The quickest way, and the one that seems to be working for me, relies on the fact that I am running Time Machine backup on a Mac, so I had easy access to files and folders as they were before the edits etc vanished. So far this looks good but there is always a possibility that some hidden corruption has existed in the database for a while and may again rear it's ugly head.

I also have my preferences set so that .ON1 sidecar files are created. This is needed for second method. I am not sure about the first and whether I have successfully restored a usable database or if it is being updated from .ON1 sidecar files.

First thing to do if you suffer this loss close On1 down as I have seen earlier reports that the cleared database entries get written to .ON1 files over-writing the edit information in these. 

The key folder is <user>/Library/Application Support/On1

(* Note, the User Library is hidden by default. To reach it, open a new Finder window, then press and hold the Option key on your keyboard while you click the Go menu at the top of your screen. Select the Library option which appears. From there, you can continue into the Application Support/ON1.)

First step is to save current .ON1 folder by renaming it. My approach in situations like this is to add .old to the end of the file name. This makes sure the folder is still available if this recovery does not work and you need to use the second method.

Now open Time Machine and travel back to a time before everything went pear-shaped and locate the ON1 folder, then restore this.

After it is restored then opening ON1 should show list of catalogued folders and any albums as they were before the disaster. It looks as though catalogue information needs to be updated so probably need to leave ON1 running whilst this happens. Also when opening a folder or album it may take a while for preview to update to show edited version and for the edit icon to appear. I am not sure if this means that things are being updated from .ON1 files or just linked to the updating of the catalogued folders. Key thing is that everything seems to be back as it was.

If you do not run Time Machine or similar then the other way that I test out for getting edits back takes a bit more resetting.

Having renamed the ON1 folder as above restart ON1, this creates a new ON1 folder, then close ON1 down.

Now copy the ON1/Extras 2021 subfolder from the renamed ON1 folder to new one, this restores any extra LUTs etc.

Then copy the ON1/ON1 PhotoRaw 2021/Presets from the renamed ON1 folder to the new one, this restores any extra presets.

Finally restart ON1 and go through the process of recataloguing folders and recreating Albums. The suggestion to use keywords to identify images and their albums makes the latter much easier! Probably makes sense to add a folder at a time to the list of catalogued folders and let the cataloguing of that complete before moving on to the next.

I am not sure of the location of the relevant folders on Windows or if any tweaks are needed to access them, I am sure a Windows expert can supply this information.

At the moment I have now idea what I did to trigger this loss of information as I wasn't doing anything much that I haven't done before, so nothing concrete to supply to support to help find out why the loss occurred.