P: Possible problem with catalog backup zip files

What are you doing when you receive the message indicated in Daniel's post, or what message do you get and what are you doing if the message is different?

The only time LR 6.1 saves uncompressed backups is on a Mac when they are larger than 4GB because Mac's OS utilities cannot open them.

Normally you should be able to double-click on a ZIP file from Windows Explorer and the default ZIP utility will open it.

I am having the same issue as Daniel. I am not a wizard with computers and need help to open. Is there a way to save the files in an uncompressed manner as I did before I upgraded to Lightroom 6?

I'm using windows 8.1. The backup unzip's but does not load. The error says 'lightroom cannot use the catalog named lightroom_5-2.lcrat[1] because it is not writable and cannot be opened', then asks if I would like to try again.

I'm using windows 8.1. The backup unzip's but does not load. The error says 'lightroom cannot use the catalog named lightroom_5-2.lcrat[1] because it is not writable and cannot be opened', then asks if I would like to try again.

Daniel, I want to make sure I understand you.

What OS? Version?

You have a Zipped catalog backup created by Lightroom?
And it won't unzip?
Or, it will unzip but won't open.

The file name looks right. If you upgraded a LR 5 catalog, it would have been called 5-2.

LR6 crashed yesterday after your ad appeared for 'syncing' at startup. When I restarted it the catalog was gone. I tried to load the latest backup catalog. LR says the file is not writable or in use by another program. This only occurs with LR6 backups (all of them). I have applied the 6.1 update. The LR6 backups are named lightroom 5-2.lcrat. Shouldn't they be lightroom 6.

Double-clicking the file causes the OS X Archive Utility to launch, but since it doesn't recognize the file as a ZIP file already, it gets confused and begins packing it up into a new ZIP file.

If you try opening it at the command line with the built-in unzip utility, you get an error:

warning [Lightroom Catalog.lrcat.zip]:  76 extra bytes at beginning or within zipfile

  (attempting to process anyway)

error [Lightroom Catalog.lrcat.zip]:  reported length of central directory is

  -76 bytes too long (Atari STZip zipfile?  J.H.Holm ZIPSPLIT 1.1

  zipfile?).  Compensating...

   skipping: Lightroom Catalog.lrcat  need PK compat. v4.5 (can do v2.1)

I tried upgrading to Info-Zip 6.0 (Apple still ships 5.52 for some reason) and it only gives a shorter version of the same complaint.

I finally found that The Unarchiver will open these files, but you shouldn't have to install third-party software to restore a backup. I note that Lightroom itself won't directly open a *.lrcat.zip file.

If you're wondering why I have found this problem so quickly after Lr6's release, it is not because I am already restoring from backups. It is that I already had a method for compressing Lightroom catalog backups that is far more efficient than ZIP, and thus had to modify that script to cope with this change in Lightroom.

My method is based on xz(1), which gets the resulting file down to about half the size of the ZIP file produced by Lightroom. I have put the script online for anyone who cares to make use of it. (I tried to put it in pre blocks here, but the site's formatting code wrecks it.)

You will need to change the cbdir variable to your desired backup location. Also, it assumes that you tell Lightroom to save its backups in ~/tmp, which you will either need to emulate or change in the script.

When exiting LR6 and doing a backup, it runs until it gets to optimizing catalog and then goes into a 'non-responding' state. It appears to create a normal backup and a compressed backup in the backup folder. I've not seen it do this before so it probably has something to do with the crash.

Turning off optimize catalog during backup has no effect - it still 'crashes' before the end. Optimizing the catalog while in LR6 is fine, no problems reported.

Bob Frost

Well, LR6CC seems to have 'self-healing' code!!

Today, I played about with face recognition, and then tried backing up the catalog again. Surprise, surprise, it worked properly. The only difference I could see was that it was taking a long time to optimize the catalog, before it flashed up 'compressing the catalog', and then optimized the previews and finished normally, without any of the 'Not responding' that I have experienced so far with LR6.

And I didn't change anything in the computer in the last day; I was out most of the time. No updates, no nothing, unless Adobe is sending secret updates in all this communication that's going on in LR6CC.

It's debugged itself!!

Bob Frost