For what it's worth, I was starting to organize my thoughts to get started on my TR from our November 7-day stay at CSR. Before I do that, I thought, I better make a little room on the old iMac and I started to clean it up by moving the files around as I usually do. I don't have a backup drive but we do our backups by sharing across the network to other machines. That way, if things fail, we're still in the clear. My iPhoto library was just shy of 75GB with 45,420 family pictures in it, most of which were collected in the last three years since we upgraded to the better Canon 8MP camera. We had movies and pictures, everything from our daily lives cataloged in nice and neat events. Things were swell.
At least until I started to back up my stuff and I found that I didn't have any room to move things where I needed to. Part of my task included erasing my WinXP partition (bootcamp) on the mac, increasing its size, and installing Win7 Home Premium. In order to do that I first had to back that up. I moved some of my iMovie events files (26GB) to another computer, purged some of the old movies and pictures, and deleted that partition. Back to the iPhoto portion, I moved off everything in my iPhoto library from 2001-2007 (9GB) from the file level (./users/me/pictures/iphoto library/original files/2001-2007, ./users/me/pictures/iphoto library/modified files/2001-2007, ./users/me/pictures/iphoto library/data/2001-2007) to help make some room. I had more than enough space to create a new 100GB Win7 bootcamp partition and I gave it a whril. 2 hours later, Win7 was up and running and I was ready to get started on the trip report. I looked at my drive and found that I had 25GB free (with the purchase of a backup drive planned for next month and knowing that I wouldn't take many more pics in the meantime) I opted to copy the photos from 2001-2007 back into my iPhoto library.
You know how, when you copy a directory of files on a Windows machine over another directory with the same directory names in it, the system will automatically append the files?
Example: Copy from
..\awesome\super\duper\
1.jpg
2.jpg
3.jpg
into:
..\awesome2\super\duper\
4.jpg
5.jpg
6.jpg
you'll get
..\awesome2\super\duper\
1.jpg
2.jpg
3.jpg
4.jpg
5.jpg
6.jpg
Right? Well... on a mac it doesn't do that.
All of our pictures, all organized in event format, and our videos from 2008-now are gone. When I went to visit my grandma before she died? Gone. When my wife and daughter took their bonding trip to Florida via train to see the grandmas? Gone. My son's last year with the Young Marines, including the pictures of my disabled wife doing a ropes course at 70' in the air - something that will never, ever occur again? Gone. Our trip to Disney with all 7 days cataloged and sorted and ready to be put into a TR? Gone. All in all, I lost 45,000 photos and 1,200 videos.
On the plus side, I now have a wife who will not question my decision to buy a 2TB mirrored backup solution for the house.
I'd throw up the "badpc" smiley but it was my fault. No sense mocking the hardware for my mistake.
BAH!
take a phone call and kind of lost track of where my thoughts were. Then when I finally got focused again, I saw it had been closed. Oh well - props to Tim!!!! 
