Restoring/creating missing media references in Umbraco Media section

Question

I have an Umbraco (v6.1.6) website, hosted on Azure Hosted (Website & DB).

Recently the client reported, that some images have disappeared from the website!

Looking at the CMS back office, the content nodes are referencing media items, but 'some' of those items are no longer present in the media section! The media files are however present on the web server in the /media folder as expected!

Now, this should be running as a single instance site, but looks like the site was run in with multiple(3) instances for a while, such as when the missing images were loaded. [All the unaffected media has lower id’s (<10000) while the missing items in the media section have higher ids (20000’s or 50000’s)]

The site is now back to running one instance.

Q. Is there a way I can re-generate the items in the Umbraco Media section, based on the media actually present in the /Media folder?

Answer 1

What you need to do depends a lot on the state of your site and what has been going on while it was running in 3 instances... and what you want the outcome to be!

Metadata for media in umbraco is stored in the database and the actual files are stored on disk. If your site has been running in 3 instances using the same database but different file locations on disk, you should actually be seeing that the media items exist in the database even though the files might be scattered in the 3 instances on the file system.

It however sounds like you're saying that the files all do exist on disk, but the media items not all exist in the database. Can you confirm this (as it sounds really strange unless you have been running 3 different databases also).

All in all, everything here sounds really strange since running 3 instances should also require you to have had this running and accessed by the editors uploading the files, using 3 different hostnames?

No matter what I don't think theres a simple solution to your problem. There's no way to have umbraco "reindex" the media folder based on the files there. What I have done for broken media libraries (usually self inflicted breakage, that is) is to load up all existing media items in memory and then loop through the file system to see what is missing from the library and recreate those media items and upload the files to them. Do remember to log which files you are recreating as media items so you can do a file system delete of the orphaned files after they have been processed.

If you can shed a bit more light on the issue, I will see if I can come up with a better solution for you.