Help recovering photos lost during wifi file transfer. No Time Machine. :'(

Question

Level 1

19 points

Help recovering photos lost during wifi file transfer. No Time Machine. :'(

My photos were lost while in transit from one mac (an old 2009 iMac) to another mac (2021 MacBook Air) on the same local network via WiFi when the network connection was disrupted. Now I only have broken Alias files for all the photos.

The folder was a Burn-to-DVD ready folder but as the DVD component no longer worked reliably I was trying to copy the 798MB folder over to my newer Mac. So I dragged the folder in the Finder window on the iMac to the other computer that was connected and listed in the sidebar Locations section. It began to copy across but promptly stopped and told me the folder could not be copied as the network connection has been broken.

Now all I'm apparently left with is the complete list of the burn folder's contents but only in Alias form and what was folder with nearly a 800MB of data contained in it now only has 1.6MB.

Surely they files wouldn't have been instantly erased? Dragging files across systems or onto external HDD's only ever copied the data and left the original files as they were. The photos are extremely precious and sentimental to me and my family and I would really appreciate any advice of suggestions anyone might have. Thank you...

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 14.4

Posted on Nov 2, 2024 2:33 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

116,782 points

Nov 3, 2024 1:06 PM in response to billyjack76

A burn folder is always just aliases. If the aliases don't point to anything now, they didn't point to anything when you started to copy. You are correct, copying files doesn't erase them.

I don't know if copying the folder of aliases would copy the original or the aliases. Pretty sure it would copy the originals if they existed.

Unless you can find the originals on the iMac, they are gone.

Reply

Answer 2

steve626

Level 6

11,507 points

Nov 3, 2024 5:53 PM in response to billyjack76

As Barney indicated, aliases do not have any image file content, they are just pointers. Burn folders do not contain the actual files to be burned to the DVD, they have aliases to those original files.

So what you really need to do is locate the original image files (photos) on the old iMac. Have you looked in the original locations on the iMac 2009 and there is nothing there? If that is the case, that would be a catastrophic anomaly that I have never seen or heard of before.

Even if you had unwittingly instructed the Mac to MOVE rather than copy the files, only some of them might have been affected.

I am wondering if the iMac 2009 experienced a disk error while the copy was proceeding and if that is why the files cannot be located. I would start by searching on the iMac 2009 for all files ending in ".jpg" or whatever the file extension would be for those files. The files may still be on there somewhere.

If they are really no longer visible on the iMac, think about where those photos came from: do you still have the camera cards? Are they anywhere in cloud storage? Have any been texted or emailed to anyone? It's very unusual for only one single copy of important photos to be kept ONLY on a 15-year old computer! At least SOME must be somewhere else. Are there any duplicates or copies on external drives, other media?

You can also try a file recovery service. In which case do not use the iMac any more as recovery has a better chance if additional activity is halted.

Reply