Exiftool is a Godsend

[slickdawg]

I wanted to take a minute to express my sincere thanks to Phil, for an incredible tool in exiftool. 

It's a long story, but I'll make it short as I can.   

Couple tens of thousands of photos from almost two decades with a lost partition table on a drive, and you begin to get a good idea of what hell would be like. 

What happened, didn't you protect your data? 

Why yes, I did.  I had two 4TB drives mirrored through the intel chipset on my motherboard.  Two copies was a good start, but what if something really bad happened?  I better make a second copy to an external drive, just in case. 

I work in IT, I've used Acronis true image to make drive images hundreds of times without issue.  So I proceeded to do it one more time, this time, with MY data. 

This was in 2013, just as 4TB drives were coming into the mainstream.  While Acronis 2013 claimed it could handle >2TB drives, it didn't for me. 

After the backup failed, I rebooted the computer only to find drive D gone.  G O N E.  The partition table was nowhere to be found. If you ever find yourself in this situation, this is where you pull the drives out because if you write anything to them, you significantly decrease your chances of getting your files back.

I went through multiple data recovery programs trying to recover my files.  For the sake of brevity, Stellar Phoenix did the best job of finding files and recovering them.  On NTFS filesystems, you're not going to get the directory structure back. Don't be greedy, be thankful you could at least get most of your files back.

So over the next several months, I got most everything back into one directory and procrastinated until now to organize it.  Another reason for procrastinating, my datestamps on my files were trashed.

I started the task of cleaning all this up over Thanksgiving, and I ran across exiftool.  GODSEND.  What a blessing this has been.  Fortunately my metadata is intact on my photos, and exiftool has been a breeze in getting the datestamps back to their original values.  I still have plenty to do, but the worst of it was relatively painless thanks to exiftool. 

Did I mention THANK YOU PHIL !!!!!

[Phil Harvey]

I feel for you.  Definitely a piece of hell there.

Glad ExifTool could help out.

- Phil