P: Unable to backup catalog in Lightroom 4

Hi Matt,

Yeah, sounds like that's probably the issue. Let me know your results.

Thanks,
Ben

Ben,

I found a larger issue with the portable USB 2.0 WD hard drive my catalog was stored on. The filesystem is very corrupted (can't even be repaired in disk utility). I'm assuming this could be the culprit. I'm going to back-up the files and re-format the drive and see if that fixes things.

As a tip, when I moved the catalog file to another folder (on the same portable hard drive), or another drive everything seemed to work ok. This leads me to believe the folder permissions and structure are corrupted in part of the drive.

Hi Matt,

I have downloaded your catalog. It backs up just fine for me, with no errors, and with both "optimize" and "check integrity" selected. A few questions.

1. What version of OSX are you using?
2. What is the failure mode? Does it give you an error? Just freeze and never complete? Something else?
3. Does it succeed if you uncheck just "optimize", and leave "integrity check" selected?
4. Does it succeed if you uncheck just "integrity check" and leave "optimize" selected?
5. Does it back up successfully if it's located on your startup disk instead of on an external hard drive?

-Ben

Hi Ben,

Here is the link to the Dropbox folder. I'm not sure if the permissions are setup correctly but let me know if they are not.

My catalog is quite large and was converted from Lightroom 3. I've never had this problem before installing Lightroom 4. I started using Lightroom as of version 2. I had the issue on both OSX Lion and OSX Mountain Lion. I was on version 3 of Lightroom on Snow Leopard and version 4 on both Lion and Mountain Lion.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/s9pkv2qp99...

Thanks for looking into it. I'm sure there are others that must have this issue. Hopefully the search engines will continue picking up this thread for others to contribute.

Hi Matt,

The issue that these other users were having (and the issue that was fixed) was an out-of-memory error that occurred only on 32bit Windows machines. That is obviously not the problem that you're having. If you'd like, I'd be happy to take a look at your catalog. You can compress it and upload it to Dropbox or YouSendIt, or a similar service, and post the download link here. I would only need the catalog file itself (no photos or preview files).

Thanks,
Ben

I'm not sure if this thread is closed but I have the same problem still on Lightroom 4.1. I'm on OSX 64 bit, with 8 GB of RAM and plenty of HD space on the external drive where the catalog and image files are stored.

Unchecking the optimize and check integrity allows the file to be backed up. The issue seems to be in the optimize and/or check integrity process.

Yes, I can confirm that the original issue has been resolved in LR 4.1 for Windows, 32-bit on my computer, which is the OS this threat was about.

Hi Tobias,

The problem that the original poster was having was a problem unique to 32 bit Windows machines, and that is the problem that has been fixed. That is obviously not the problem that you are experiencing.

I assume that, per the error message, you have verified disk permissions and available space? The fact that you're backing up to a network share introduces a vast number of variables, which make it difficult to diagnose the problem. Does the backup succeed if you backup to a local disk instead?

-Ben

Sorry, but i am using LR 4.1 on OSX Lion 10.7.4 with MBP and my catalog backup on an SMB-Share does not work. "Check Integrety" and "Catalog Optimizeatio" is checked.
The backup folder is created and a temporary file seems to be created to, but after a while there is a dialog with the following text:

"Lightroom konnte den Katalog “Lightroom 4 Catalog” nicht sichern.
Überprüfen Sie Ihre Ordnerberechtigungen und stellen Sie sicher, dass Sie ausreichend Speicherplatz auf Ihrem Datensicherungslaufwerk und im Laufwerk des Hauptkatalogs haben."

But as you can see below the Files have been created during backup process.

Tobiass-MacBook-Pro:2012-06-01 0006 togeis$ ls -l
total 491644
-rwx------ 1 togeis staff 251453440 1 Jun 00:07 Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat
-rwx------ 1 togeis staff 267920 1 Jun 00:07 Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat-journal
Tobiass-MacBook-Pro:2012-06-01 0006 togeis$ ls -l
Tobiass-MacBook-Pro:2012-06-01 0006 togeis$ ls -la
total 540008
drwx------ 1 togeis staff 16384 1 Jun 00:07 .
drwx------ 1 togeis staff 16384 1 Jun 00:06 ..
-rwx------ 1 togeis staff 276451328 1 Jun 00:07 .smbdeleteAAA592b4.4
Tobiass-MacBook-Pro:2012-06-01 0006 togeis$ pwd
/Volumes/share/Bilder/Katalog_Backup/2012-06-01 0006
Tobiass-MacBook-Pro:2012-06-01 0006 togeis$

After the broken process there is a .smbdelete file, which disapears whenn LR4.1 is closed.