Hi. I moved all of my 2009 galleries into a 2009 sub folder, and all of the names, descriptions, dates, etc were lost. 1) is there any way to recover this and 2) how should i properly be moving folders so that this doesn't happen again?

thanks

The most secure way of preventing this is to place all that infromation into EXIF/IPTC metadata in your images.

Also you will need to use the nightly build as there have been some problems fixed related to loss of Database fields on move/copy/rename. (If you used FTP, then only the first suggestion will work.)