Hello to all,
I am afraid that I have quite a sad and seemingly hopeless story to share with you, upon this cold and dreary Winter's day. My story begins some time ago, when I sold my 20" iMac and upgraded to a brand new 21". You might ask what sadness could be associated with such a splendid upgrade? I will share this and more with you, dear reader, but you must be patient. Well, before I sold my 20" I backed up my entire computer using none other than Apple's very own Time Machine. However, this is where I failed, and this is where my story takes a sad and bitter turn. With my 20" sold and gone, I purchased a 21" from the local classifieds. Oh what a beautiful machine! I eagerly migrated everything over from my backup, and for awhile it seemed I was in technological bliss. Everything was there, my music, my movies, my applications, my photos...huh?...what's this??? One day my wife was looking through some photos in iPhoto and she met the infamous exclamation point. For those who have never encountered this villain, it shows up when your cached thumbnails fail to link back to the actual pictures. I had met this adversary before, and had defeated him. This time however, his villainous plot was far darker than I could have imagined. When my wife showed me, I thought I would be her knight and shining armor and banish the dark exclamation point forever. I opened up the contents of the iPhoto library, and to my shock and dismay, many (actually most) of the originals were gone. I searched for invisible (hidden) files, but still they were missing. How could this be? It seems that Time Machine is the true villain and the exclamation point is only one of its henchmen. I have searched the web for hours, nay even days for help. I have searched my computer to its very frameworks, all to no avail. They are gone...forever. In desperation I called the technical support of my favorite company. Yes, I called Apple. Off the record I was told that Time Machine cannot be trusted for such important things. I was further advised that in the future I actually need to manually copy over my important files such as movies, music, documents, and yes, photos. It seems shameful that a program who's entire purpose is to safeguard your precious data, cannot successfully complete its reason for being. I have long abandoned this failure of a program, and I am now quite happy with Carbon Copy Cloner. But this does not bring back my precious photos. These are irreplaceable. They are those precious times with my wife, my two precious children, and my relatives. I have been told that this is hopeless, that all is lost. Yet, I will not give up. I have come to terms with the fact that the full quality pictures are lost. But I hold out hope that I would be able to somehow get the pictures back (even if they be lower quality) through the cached thumbnails. I have tried taking screenshots, but they are so low quality (only 72dpi). I had seen people use a very high resolution digital camera and take photos of printed pictures, instead of scanning them in, so I thought this might work. The pictures are just too blurry when I take them of the screen, using a 8MegaPixel Sony camera. I have truly reached the end of my capabilities.
I send this plea out to all who have a heart, that they will try to help me come up with a viable solution. My wife gets tears in her eyes every time we talk of them possibly never coming back. You will be my hero, and hers if you can come up with some way of using those cached files. I am very willing to listen to suggestions. PLEASE HELP ME.
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