[ubermonkey]

Gaaaah.

This is mostly not about Lightroom, or photos, or any of those specifics. This is about (a) a failure in a migration followed by (b) *failure of the user to verify the migration before deleting the original copies*:

>To make matters worse, I deleted the photos from the USB hard drive, without verifying the new catalog.

That line is, not coincidentally, where I stopped reading.

[selfhoster11]

It's not obvious to amateur users that these safety measures must be in place for data migration projects. Members of my family only learnt after the first data loss.