Is there a way to do a restore from a backup file that Daminion has created?

[ckbeme]

Greetings all,

 

 

It's my first time visiting the forum, for the past 2 months or so when I've had a question or a problem, I used your Web chat and someone got back with me. But I've got a very serious problem with my entire photo collection and I've been waiting over 2 days for a reply so I hoped someone on here has some help to offer.

 

I've been using Daminion Stand Alone for about 2-3 months. I had some issues with it, but I thought I could live with those. I did a test run on writing the tags to the file, using about 30 photos. All went well, so I wrote tags to all of my photos. Bad idea. Hundreds of errors.

Photos were moved to different folders. My folder structure is mostly Date Taken driven, but I have some folders that are under a year and their name is related to the content.

 

Pictures

 

2001

January

February

March

2002

January

February

 

up to October 2018. Sometimes I have subfolders under the month and those sub folders have many photos under them.

 

One example of a goof up, Subfolders that WERE under 2008/November were moved to 2004/no month.

Hundreds of photos had their Creation Datetime changed to 10-17-18, which was the date I ran the process to write the tags. In some cases, those photos with changed dates were also moved to a different folder, other times they were still in the correct folder, but one or more of these - Creation Date, File Creation Date, Modify Date, Exif Date Digitized would now contain the date 10-17-18, or a seemingly random date. Not all dates were changed in a photo, but usually at least 2 dates are changed. The most important dates - Date Taken and Exif Date Digitized. Many times the Exif Date Digitized had zeros in the date field.

 

I've been backing my photos up to OneDrive, but I'm having a very hard contacting support to find out how to restore them. There's no 'Option' on the menu to restore. And I've googled and found out how to restore files/folders, but can't find any info on restoring the photos. And many of the Onedrive photos that I have uploaded myself have very little metadata.

Onedrive has a 'Virtual Folder for the backed up photos. So I can't even access the folder my pics are in to see what data is contained in this 'Virtual folder'.

 

I also saw backups being created on my PC in the directory where the Damion Catalog was stored. I didn't pay much attention to the backups, but after talking to the support person and asking her if I could use one of those she replied Yes, you can go back to whatever date the backup was created.

 

Well, all of the backups are showing the same create date and modify date -9-4-18, which is when I created this catalog of my photos. There are almost 8,000 photos in this catalog. I wasn't doing the backups, because I saw that they were being done by Daminion. But I didn't pay any attention to the dates.

 

Another problem, there were some text metadata that was in one photo, but it ended up being moved to at least 2 other photos, one from 10 years ago, another from over 15 years ago. One one pic it 'Merged' the original pic metadata Categories, Keywords, and Title with the older photo.

 

I'm going to try to put some pics up that will demonstrate just a tiny sampling of my problemss. Just trying to identify the bad photos is going to be difficult and time consuming. Fixing them is going to be even more difficult. I found one software that isn't great but it let me change the FILE CREATED date! That surprised me. But this software doesn't have any Batch processing, so it's no great victory.

 

Pics are coming, hopefully. I did screenshots of some items using software other than Daminion because I didn't see any way in Daminion to show all the data I needed to see to determine the scope of the problem. But the software I used for the pics is reliable - I verified it with 3 or 4 different photo apps, and a File Manager software that's a very good source for seeing metadata. I typed a lot of notes on these screenshots - Hope you can read the typed text. Don't know how large the pics will display on here.

 

I'm really sorry this is so long, but it's a very complex issue, and I wanted to give you guys an idea of most of the things that are messed up. And I'd love to hear from someone telling me that I can restore from one of those backup files in the Catalog folder.

 

Thanks for any help.