Time Machine appears to have eaten my entire hard drive

[Traci]

Once upon a time, around 2008, my iPhoto library was eating my hard drive and making iPhoto run slow. So I transferred just my photo library to an external hard drive.
Some time later, maybe around 2010, I started using Time Machine to back up my hard drive on this same external hard drive. I recall creating a partition just for Time Machine to use. I even recall making a Time Machine back up or two and going back and looking and yep my old photos were still there.

Flash forward to today, I fire up this external hard drive to find one of these old photos, and all I can see on this hard drive are my Time Machine backups. O_O I can't seem to access any other partitions.
I ran Disk Utility Verify Disk and Repair Disk. No effect. I *can* see that there appears to be 82 gigs of unused space, as my 10 Time Machine backups are not using the whole drive.

Help! Any suggestions?
I've always uploaded my best photos to Flickr, so it wouldn't be a huge huge loss, but still... *tear*.
Thanks in advance!

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

Hi Traci & welcome, when you launch Disc Utility, & when the connected ext HD show up in the left column, beneath it can you see 1 or 2 partitions?

 

[Traci]

Only 1.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

When you connect the drive, only one icon mounts on your desktop & that's the time machine partition, right?

In the past when connected can you remember seeing 2 separate partitions mounting, the one containing your iPhoto library & the TM partition?

 

[Traci]

I believe the photo library was just a separate folder. I don't really remember unfortunately.
I do think it's hopeful that there's 82 gigs of mystery space. This drive is only 320 gigs total.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

You wrote:

I recall creating a partition just for Time Machine to use.

This implies 2 partitions … unless the other partition has become corrupt I can't explain how it could just disappear.

In Disc Utility you say only one partition shows up underneath the ext HD in the left column.

So if you can't recall ever seeing 2 partitions mounted on your desktop then I would recommend you consider taking the drive to an Apple Store and talk to a technician there about data recovery but it could be costly and not worth the bother.

I think you are lucky to have the photos also backed up to Flickr and you might need to download them again to back them up locally.

 

[Traci]

Thank you!