Lightroom Classic: 2018 Files inaccessible

Hi Bill,
first of all: don't panic. Relax and make yourself a coffee or something. If you lost your mind you will probably lost your files even quicker.

Then remember what you did last before the files 'disappeared'. Was there an error message of any kind? What do you mean with 'the screen literally flickered'? Was this a hardware problem? If yes, it has nothing to do with Lightroom or your pictures. Lightroom will not delete files if your graphics card is broken or the graphic card's driver is faulty.

Then check your Lightroom version number and search for others with a similar problem.

What do you mean with 'master file'? Your catalog? If yes, how do know that all files prior 2018 are in the catalog? If no, what is it?

Then check your 2018's folder's space with Windows Explorer. Is it 0 MB? If no, what's in there? If yes, what's your anti virus software? Are these files within the anti virus' quarantine?

If you can't find the files after all this, search for them with Explorer's search tool all over your drive(s).

If you can't find them, check your recycle bin. Windows or any software will not delete files without hoover them in this bin before really deleting them.

If you can't find them furthermore, check your last backup. If you don't have a backup of this obviously important files... well... they are your core work files as you said... then you're out of luck but then there must be reason for this behavior of Windows or Lightroom. To figure it out you must know what's different with your 2018's files compared to 2017.

Best wishes,
Jens

This post is 20 hours old as I write this, so I may be too late already, but from this short summary it sounds like a possible disk failure due to some kind of power glitch. I presume that what you call "the entire master file (2018)" is actually a folder? I don't know of any normal way to keep an entire year of images in a single file. If this folder disappeared only in Lightroom and still exists as a folder on your harddrive, you have only a Lightroom problem and can maybe restore your catalog from the last backup, or at worst you could import that folder again. But if the folder is actually missing from your harddrive, you have only a little time to possibly recover it. There are a variety of disk recovery tools available and I am unable to recommend any particular one, so go have a look. Usually Google and various websites will talk common sense about these.

Fast action can be important if you actually lost a folder. It might be recovered intact if you act quickly, or Windows might be re-assigning disk blocks for new files right now and clobbering these lost files, so the sooner you get some software to try and find the missing files and folders, the better your chances of recovery.

There are also Windows routines you could run instead of a professional tool, but that takes more knowledge than I can share here. The best bet is usually some program designed for this situation.

Plus, of course you made personal back-ups of all your images, so you could just restore from those backups. But I would run some recovery tools on the drive before I did that to sort out whatever went wrong.

Great advice, Jens.  Thank you. I have made a copy of your note and stuck it on the front of my computer :-)
 
I spent approx. 3 hours with several Adobe staff, checking everything I could find through Explorer, and later rebuilt the 2018 folder from my backup (minus processed images et al). The diagnosis from Adobe was that some sort of Lightroom glitch dumped the work. Later today, when processing other images, I noticed that Lightroom was saving to a 2018 file I had never heard of. I wrote down the file path, followed it in Lightroom, and there, buried right at the end of all of my Lightroom files, was the original 2018 master folder.  Thank you, God!

The Lightroom glitch arbitrarily suddenly moved the folder to the end of my workflow, buried at the end of a seldom used master folder. Since I was just engaged in routine image processing at the time of the loss, I was pretty flummoxed.  Lightroom gave no warning: there was a screen flicker, and it was gone, so be aware that it can happen.  The Adobe people didn't really seem too interested in tracing down the source of the problem.  

I am now also backing up all processed files to a separate drive.  Don't want to repeat that heart attack.

Cheers!

Hi Bill,
I'm glad to hear that you found your pictures.
'The Adobe people didn't really seem too interested in tracing down the source of the problem.' alarms me more than a little bit. For me version 7.3.x seems so unfinished that I lost my trust in Adobes craftmanship in building great software. The bugs are so drastically obvious that no one could really mean that this is a releases candidate or even finished software. I'm a software testing engineer and the behavior of Adobe releasing extremely buggy tools is so horrible... I would risk to loose my job if I would work that way.


Yesterday, before I read your post, I found myself investigating alternatives to Lightroom just for fun and was impressed by the opportunities that opened up in the last 2 years or so with great new RAW converters. Adobe must get rid of this quality problems and ancient slow interface because people like us earning money with their software confronted with 'flickering screens' with 'arbitrarily moving files somewhere within the folder structure' is nothing that let me sleep well with hundreds of irretrievable wedding pictures... And that recent backup problem of Lightroom under macOS helps in no way.

Best wishes and a sunny weekend for you,
Jens