Develop Settings lost after backup: HELP!

Question

I have opened LR5 and found ALL the pictures have lost development settings that cost me hours of work.
Or better: when I open a folder in the Catalog the pictures are first shown for a couple of seconds with the edits (for example BW) than as originally imported. All the development settings are gone and can't be found anymore. The history is empty.
The last thing I did when I last used LR was a backup.
I opened the backup Catalog, but also this one doesn't show any edit.
Is there any way to recover.
I am honestly tempted by throw this software to the waste bin.
Thanks for any help.
Max Polix

Answer 1

While regular backups of the Catalog are a good idea, it should not really be necessary to make them every single session IMO. It is (of course) better to become confident and sure enough in the use of the software, that backups are needed only for "background" protection. If you don't trust the software, or don;t trust yourself with the software, that prevents you from progressing - so it is first necessary to understand what kinds of thing can go wrong, but also what kinds of thing cannot go wrong with LR.
Example reasons why your edits may seem to disappear from view, include firstly, that the images may have been Reset. This option applies default values to all the various adjustments, replacing whatever edited value they may have shown prior to that. However, those prior adjustments still remain accessible within each image's History; having being automatically logged to the Catalog as you have gone along, in this case as the previous step before this latest "Reset Settings" step.
Or perhaps the metadata settings may have been brought in from the file on disk, e.g. by accidentally selecting "Read metadata from file" instead of "Write metadata to file". If metadata had not previously been written out from LR to the file, then this would be like going back to its beginning "as first imported". Or if they had been saved, at some earlier point, you would be in effect recalling this earlier state again, to the top of the History. Again, however it may appear, this loading-in of the metadata is a NEW thing happening to each image. The previous step in the History still holds the PRIOR edits of the image, as they appeared before this happened.
So it is worth looking at the Catalog that you have - almost always information still held there is the key to retrieving things back to where you were before. It is important to resist rash action here: NO re-importing, NO Syncing folders, until you have worked out what the situation truly is. Then of rectifying whatever specific thing has got temporarily out of shape (most often, this is a matter of updating something within the Catalog itself), and then... carry on.
regards, RP