I have been using Time Machine to back up my iMac for a few years now.  It all seems so simple.

I then decided I would reinstall my iMac from scratch and then I could bring in all the pictures from Time Machine.

All seemed fine, but then I’ve realised I’m missing about 400 hundred pictures!  Lightroom cannot find the pictures.  Some of the directories they should be in exist and some even contain pictures, so it’s not a case that the pictures were stored somewhere else, and I just haven’t pulled them back over again.

So the only conclusion is that Time Machine never backed them up, and I’ve now read other articles where people have had similar problems.

I heard a quote a couple of weeks ago. Something along the lines of  “A photograph is not a photograph until it exists in more than one place”.  Based on that, those photos weren’t actually photos. I do have some of them somewhere else.  Some are on another machine, and some exist on Flickr, so all is not lost.  It’s just annoying, and now means I have to rethink my back up strategy if Time Machine is not going to be reliable.  I would like to store copies in The Cloud, but when dealing with RAW files, the cost quickly mounts up.

Lesson learned – Do not trust anything 🙂