My Adobe Lightroom catalog has mysteriously been replaced by a file of the same name, but at 0KB.
Previously:
Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat (2,779,624 KB)
now appears as:
Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat (0 KB)
As it’s stored on an external drive I believe it became corrupted when swapping between PCs. This is a disaster as to my horror I realise I haven’t backed it up since April - I use it everyday for work so I have managed to lose 4-5 months of edits in one overwrite, or what I assume to be an overwrite.
My question is, can files such as Adobe’s .lrcat be restored to a previous state? I have tried Window’s file properties>Previous versions but there are no previous versions listed in the pop-up. I know 3rd party programs such as Piriform Recuva are useful for recovering known file types such as jpegs but for something like a program-specific file type like .lrcat is there anything I can try?
Essentially what I need to know is whether a file that has (for one reason or another) been turned into a 0KB entity of the same name, be restored to its previous state? Will Recuva be able to search for it?And if so what search string should I be using?
Recuva won't attempt to recover a zero-byte file, and there's no way I know of to restore the previous data in the MFT record.
You could try a deep scan, looking for .lrcat extensions (if this is supported by Recuva). But this will only find the first extent, and a 2.7 gb file is very likely to be in multiple extents.
hmmm... OK. Thank you very much for getting back. The scan I am running is taking an inordinately long time (10+ hours), is it safe to run multiple instances of Recuva concurrently?
You could try a deep scan, looking for .lrcat extensions (if this is supported by Recuva). But this will only find the first extent, and a 2.7 gb file is very likely to be in multiple extents.
Also could you advise on how to go about this. I'm pretty new to Recuva, and not clear how I should be presenting search strings.
If the scan is taking ten hours then it looks as if you're doing a deep scan already.
Running multiple instances of Recuva is not a good thing, and will gain nothing. No matter what search criteria is entered Recuva will run a complete scan (as there is no way of telling where physically a file exists). So the ten hours will stretch to infinity.
Run a scan without any search criteria and then (in advanced mode) just select what you want in the FileName/Path box. You can change your selections as many times as you wish.