Restoring a catalog with sidecars but without a backup
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I tried to restore my catalog, which is on my NAS on a new Macbook after my old Mac crashed. I have no backup of my old catalog. I expected to be able to create a catalog in which ON1 would read the present sidecars, but it doesn't.
What to do?
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You have to tell the program which folders you want it to Catalog then let it rebuild then.
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I use ON1 Photo Raw 2022, and I made a new catalog on my new MacBook and choose the folder I want to use. It shows the subfolders and the files, but doesn't read the sidecars.
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Have you let the catalog finish? It could take some time to do that.
Rebuilding the catalog should read the sidecars and add them to the catalog. If it doesn't seem to be working, try going outside of On1 with your PCs browser and copying one of the backed up photos with it's sidecar into the On1 folder overwriting the one that's already there. See if On1 reads it that way, if so, copy the rest as well.
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Thank you for your answer Rick. You enlighted me. Now I know what happened.
Making the new catalog did overwrite al my .on1 files. They are all on the date of my making the catalog. And this happened only on the files I edited. They others didn't get an .on1 file.
Many thanks to ON1. Before ON1 had a database, I did this more times this way when I changed computers.
Now al my work I did since 2017 in ON1 is gone. Over 20.000 pictures. Because the way my computer crashed I didn't have backup of the database.
I feel angry.0 -
Something else is going on. Creating a Catalog does not overwrite existing .on1 files. I would be willing to bet those files were missing before you started creating the catalog which is why the edits didn’t get put into the catalog in the first place.
Do you not have any other back up of your photos and their side cars that you can restore from?
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I thought you had a backup of your photos and sidecars.
If creating the catalog messed up the sidecars, just copy them into the folder from the backup again.
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Brian, that is really not true. All my .on1 files are overwritten. On files without an .0N1 file, ON1 didn't create files because there were not.
All my files that were in a catalog, were placed on a Synology NAS, as I stated in my introduction. The crashing of my iMac didn't influence the NAS. When I edit a file I also mark it, wich create an .xmp file. You can see it in the examples I send here (the same files in two ways. And this is on all my directories.
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I have never seen Photo RAW overwrite the sidecar files just because a catalog was created. Just because the date stamp was changed does not mean the data within the file was necessarily changed. There is a touch command which will update the date info without opening the file.
Do you have a complete backup of your old system's boot drive? If so you can manually restore your old catalog(s) and internal databases just as if you had done a Migration from the old system to the new. Let's start there and if you do have one we can go through how to manually migrate the data back into place.
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Yes I have a Time Machine backup from my old system boot drive, but the photo files are on the Synology NAS. I could not find de actual database on the backup.
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Time Machine makes it a bit more difficult due to how they are managed. There isn't any 1 place with the latest updates, they are scattered all throughout the different snapshots. It also makes it slow as each of them has to be mounted in turn during the restore. I use Time Machine too but I do not rely upon it for actual backups. Those I make with Carbon Copy Cloner and I have a drive specifically for my Pictures folder to be backed up to and that is all it contains.
What I would do is delete your Pictures folder (or whatever top level folder holds your photos and their edits). Now go to ~/Library/Application Support/ON1 and delete that folder. This will basically put you at the position of a brand new install of Photo RAW without any photos yet.
Next, in the Finder, manually create your photos folder. Note that if you are using the Pictures folder that comes with the Mac OS you won't be able to delete it directly. That's OK, just delete its contents for the step above and skip creating a new one to catch up in the procedure.
Now you can open the photos folder and use Time Machine to Restore its contents. Again, this will take some time as each individual snapshot which holds the latest version of any given file has to be mounted so that file can be restored. It's a slow process; give it time.
Go to the ~/Library/Application Support folder and restore the ON1 folder from the Time Machine backup.
Those two steps should put you right back to where you were on your old system before it crashed and when Time Machine made its last hourly update. At this point you should be able to launch Photo RAW and see everything back in place.
Let me know if anything goes sideways.
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As I said, I only have a backup of my boot drive. My photos are not there, but on a Synology NAS, that mirrors in RAID 10.
I asume the ON1 catalog database was somewhere stored on the boot drive of the old Mac. From that boot drive I have one full backup from Time Machine on a seperate disk.
I think my only salvation is to know where the ON! catalog database is stored on the bootdrive, so I can find it on the backup of my boot drive.0 -
It is at ~/Library/Application Support/ON1.
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Thank you, Brian! Because I don't have a backup of my photos, I want to try to make a backup of the photofolders on the NAS, then remove all de sidecars in the folders on the NAS, remove ~/Library/Application Support/ON1 on my MacBook. Install ON1 Photo RAW again. Go to the ~/Library/Application Support folder and restore the ON1 folder from the Time Machine backup. I hope then the database will work inspite of the missing sidecars.
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I don’t think it will work the way you expect. I think not having the sidecar files is going to overwrite what is in the database. Before deleting the site cars from your NAS make sure you have copies of the originals someplace safe. Just in case.
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That is my plan
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I am very happy. My plan didn't go as I expected.
I made a copy of my catalog to an extern disk. For control reasons I opened one of the smaller directories in ON1 through Browse. I noticed it opened quickly and soon I could see my edits in that directorie. I opened another and the same happened.Then I went back to the same photos in my catalog. I still didn't see my edits there even after a long time waiting. I wondered if there could be problems in building the catalog, which me finally brought to delete the catalog inside ON1.
After that I defined the catalog all over again and it builded well now. All edits are coming up now.
So throwing away the catalog and build a new one was the solution in my case.
I want to thank both Brian and Rick to help me find the solution! THANK YOU!0 -
Good to hear Leonie. Thanks for letting us know.
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