Ah man gutted for you, I know that feeling. I have a picture of my dad kissing my son before his alzheimer's really kicked in and the only place that photo exists is on FB as I lost the set early on learning lightroom and a workflow
Since that day I have never deleted a card until I have them on my HDD in lightroom and a back location which for me is on another hdd and an external hdd. Then I delete the card.
Oh a whim I bought the LR magazine on the app store, it's very good. Liking it a lot. Bought the first 4 now and i'm getting more out of it that some of the books I have got.
Import the photos as date, tag them with landscap, portraits etc.
you can then search within LR.
Okay i guess that's more simple!
What do you do in the way of backup Raymond?
It's a 2 stage process
Stage 1 - When the photos are being processed, it is stored in a WD Thunderbolt duo running RAID 1. So it has 2 HDDs running mirror, it is a live back up as it is done on the fly.
Stage 2 - When it is done, it is archived/copied in DNG format to the Drobo running it's own RAID redundancy software.
The Library is kept in the iMac drive, which is backed up separately to the Apple Time Capsule.
Both the Thunderbolt Duo and the Drobo are sent to cloud back up.
You can get a general NAS that runs RAID 5, it'll do the same thing as a Drobo.
I recently got a Netgear ReadyNAS 104, it has 4 x 3TB in there now, it does the same thing pretty much. But I use that for my media as that was also in my Drobo once upon a time. So I got it to split them up and make it tidier.
Heard of people in Lightroom moving the highlights to the lowest level and the shadows to the max, then adjusting their photo using the whites and blacks.
Why would someone do that?