A Lesson in File History

cbay

Senior Member
Windows has some useful features, but i learned the hard way that File History wasn't one of the best decisions i've made. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Shame on me for not paying closer attention to how it was storing the files i was backing up. I just kept using it without paying much attention.... That is until i got a new computer and needed to upload a bunch of photos and put them with Lightroom.
The process of getting Lightroom set up with the new pc was not working out at all. Tried everything i could think of but none of the adjustments would show up. After exhausting myself trying to get things working i finally decided to take a closer look at the photos i was trying to link to Lightroom. It turns out that File history changes the file names. A (date,_xx_xx_xx-xx) right in the middle of the file number.
Since i had many thousands of images that were now useless to Lightroom i had a couple choices; either try to copy straight from the old computer and lose some that were taken off or find a way to bulk rename all the files. If i would have manually backed up to the external drive it wouldn't have been a problem, but too late for that.
I found "Bulk rename Utility" and downloaded it to see if i could figure it out. Took some time but after messing with it for a while was able to get all the files renamed and Lightroom working like new.
I'm sharing this in case someone else may be using "windows file history" to back up and hasn't had the pleasure yet of going through this ordeal. In the rename utility there is a box "5" where you can enter a number "from" and "to". This is the number of spaces to remove from the file number. Check the "trim" box as well. In box "12" you can set to include subfolders. I just used control/A keys. You can see your results as you make changes - as they show a duplicate file that changes as you make setting which is very useful.
Hope this helps someone if they run into this situation.
Here's a pic of the utility

bulk rename.PNG
 
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nickt

Senior Member
I did a similar thing with Genie Timeline free backup software. It was renaming newer file versions with a .1, .2, etc. LR and a few other programs were not happy about that. Neither was I. Sure, it was nice to have my files back after the crash, but it cost me a couple extra hours of cleanup to find the newest version of everything.
 
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