Restoring lost images

Hi! I had a disaster this week when the drive on which I stored the Movie Collector software AND the Images folder were both corrupted (along with other stuff). Bad enough. To make matters worse, my backups were overwritten, so I couldn’t restore anything. Terrible. When I reinstalled Movie Collector, I was able to sync all of my movies. However, because my Images folder was destroyed, thousands of my movies lost the images I had hand-selected over the years. I get thousands of “cannot download image…”

When I went to Movie Connect, all my images seem to be there, but, while it has my images, it doesn’t seem to have transferred many if any of the personal edits I added over the years on Movie Collector, e.g., edits I made to episodes, notes, plots and the like.

I’d love to go back to Movie Collector, but is there any way I can retrieve the images I had in my Images folder?

David

I’m sorry to hear this.

  • Movie Connect does not allow episode editing, so that data (if you personalized your episodes) is not on our servers for you.

Please answer these questions for me:

  • Notes/Plots changes for your movies/series (not episodes) are stored on Movie Connect, so those should really be there - but if you use excessive HTML editing in your plots/notes, some data might be lost - as we only allow basic HTML to be synced in those fields (did you do that?)
  • As for the images that say they’re failing to download, can you pinpoint 3 or 4 movie titles in your collection that are failing to download an image so I can investigate?

Last resort for images:

  • It will be possible to just download “our Core” cover for your movies, for all of them of course, but let’s do that as last resort and see what data we can get.

Restoring data:
If the drive has become corrupted, and you have no other place on the computer where you stored the .mvc file and images, I can’t really help in that area (perhaps find a professional harddrive fixer… but this can become very expensive.

Thank you for your very full response. You gave me much food for thought. So, just a couple of questions:

  1. It appears that, really, Movie CONNECT has synched everything except my episode additions and changes; so, it seems that in every way but this, Movie CONNECT has synced everything else nicely, which is good.

  2. If I re-install Movie COLLECTOR and re-sync it with CLZ Cloud, I realize I will not be able to download the COVERS that I personalized because they were lost when the IMAGES folder on my desktop was wiped out. However, when I resync Movie COLLECTOR with CLZ Cloud, will it restore to Movie COLLECTOR all the episode edits I have made?

If you can please answer these two questions, I think I will have only one question left! Again, thank you so much for your help!

David

Hi David,

I only noticed one question in your last message:

Episode edits are not in CLZ Cloud, so those are not on our servers for you to download again as we just don’t have those changes anywhere (other than on your own computer, on the failed drive).

The only episode information that is synced is “seen it” and “seen when”.
Episode them selves (titles, image, plot, airdate, special actors that we have for them) are coming from Core and will download as well. But that is al centralized information anyway.

Let me know if you have further questions.

Thank you for clarifying all of my options and enabling me to understand what I can and cannot restore. Clearly, my best option is to simply continue using Movie CONNECT, though I’m naturally disappointed I will not have access to any of my personally-added episode edits and additions. Happily, Movie CONNECT has left me with everything else and that is no small thing! So thank you again very much for your help. I’m truly grateful!

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So let me see if I understand: If I sync Movie COLLECTOR to your Core and I don’t have any IMAGES file on my computer, are you saying Movie COLLECTOR can download ALL the default movie covers for my entire collection (which is synced to Movie CONNECT now? (In other words, the same movie covers I have on Movie CONNECT now.)

If you want to download the default covers, you can right click a movie in Movie Collector on your computer, and hit Update from Core, which will download the default cover.

Try it with 1 or 2 and see if you like the results.

Note that you can set up which fields it should/should not download during update from Core.

Changing Update from Core settings:
In the main screen, click “Tools > Options”. Then click on “Data and Images”.
Then click the button “Download settings for data and images” to change settings for which field-information should/should not be downloaded or updated.

If you like the results for 1 or 2 movies, you can select multiple and right click and use Update from Core.

Would that help you out there?