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Help...I thought I backed up my photos on an external...

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Oct 18, 2008
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Alright...

So I had an old MacBook Pro from a couple years ago. I take a lot of photos and used to be able to drag the iPhoto Library icon to an external hard drive and it would back up all my photos.

Well, the old 80 gig MacBook Pro hard drive wasn't cutting it anymore and I wanted something faster, so I got a brand spankin' new MacBook Pro this summer with a 250 gig hard drive, figuring I'd have to back up my photos less often.

However, that time has come and yesterday I went out and bought a 250 gig external at Best Buy for 90 bucks. Came home late last night and...dragged the iPhoto Library icon to my external and started the backup. I saw the window pop up with the estimated time to back it all up, it was going to take all night. I went to bed.

Woke up, and there were about 10 minutes to go on the transfer. When the transfer was finished, I deleted my iPhoto Library off my hard drive to free up some space.

Then I realized there were some photos I needed, so I plugged the external back in and clicked on the iPhoto Library and...nothing. It just opened up iPhoto on my computer. With nothing in it. No photos, nothing.

Now...I know 180 gigs of photos were transferred last night. What else took all that time? And there's only about 50 gigs of space left on the external. What's going on?

So did I really just do what I think I did and LOST ALL MY PHOTOS FROM THIS PAST SUMMER?
 
Joined
Sep 2, 2008
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Your Mac's Specs
2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM MacBook, 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
OK, when you plug in your external hard drive, the driver icon should appear on your desktop. Can you click on that and access the files from there?

(I do not own an external hard drive, but I've worked with them before)
 
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K
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OK, when you plug in your external hard drive, the driver icon should appear on your desktop. Can you click on that and access the files from there?

(I do not own an external hard drive, but I've worked with them before)

Yeah, it appears...but that's the thing, I can't access the files. I see an iPhoto Library icon in there, but nothing directing it to the next field where the photos should be.

Here's a screen cap of what I see:

external.jpg


So you see the iPhoto Library icon? That's whats in my external.

I think what I'm gonna do now is try to copy that icon BACK onto my laptop, then try to do this whole thing over again. I pray it works.

I dragged it to my desktop. It says "Preparing Copy to Desktop" and it as for quite awhile. I think I might have just fixed this.
 
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13" MBP 2.3Ghz i7 32GB 1TB | iPhone XR
That iphoto Library icon, if you right click it and click on Show Folder Contents, can you see any thing in there?
 
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Your Mac's Specs
13" MBP 2.3Ghz i7 32GB 1TB | iPhone XR
Too Much Spare Time ;)
 

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