Lightroom catalog suddenly disappeared

I'd like to echo something similar to hucksterville said back in 2018.

I've experienced a lost/corrupt catelogue in the past, so intentionally set it up in a file structure I understood, and backed up manually alongside Adobe backups. 

Now today, fortunately only a week after my past backup, something goes funky with lightroom, so I force quit and also restart after other applications experience the same funky stuff.

After restart, the catelogue is gone. I know exactly what folder it should be in. Windows says last modified was only minutes beforehand. But the folder is empty.

The automated backups were on a different drive. I also know that folder's location. That folder also was last modified when I last used lightroom, and that folder is also empty. 

My only remaining copies of that catelogue are the manual ones I made myself. 

There is something that Lightroom is capable of doing (whether intentional or not) that can result in it nuking its own catelogues and backups. From my experience (this is the second time such a thing has happened to me) it tends to be when the application is closed not on its own terms. But sometimes you can't avoid that.

These catelogues represent hundreds of hours of work and for some people monetary investment, and for all traces of them to vanish, to seemingly quite a number of people, suggests it is far more than "user error" and "bad sectors" and it is very unhelpful for the official tech support answer to be "that's not how it works you screwed up there's no recourse". I knew where I was looking and there isn't a way that sectors on two different drives corrupted at the same moment. Those folders were accessed, seemingly to delete or corrupt their contents.

Therefore, I also mirror hucksterville in saying that the only way to protect against the possibility of Lightroom nuking your catelogues is to do your own backups, in a place far away from what it recognises

tried to open a backup catalogue, but the most recent backup is from January

1. Where do you keep your catalog, what drive?

2. Where do you place your backup, what drive?

Hopefully inquiry 1 and inquiry 2 have different answers.

All the collections photos are still synced to lightroom mobile and web, s

Did you perhaps sync your Lightroom Classic catalog to Lightroom (as in cloud)?

But odd that your backups are missing

I'd find all these posts a lot more credible if people said, "this specific folder is where I keep my Lightroom catalog, and this specific folder is where I keep my image files". The general impression here is that things are just dumped somewhere on the computer without any idea where it goes.

As has been pointed out countless times, there is nothing in Lightroom that will just "delete" a catalog file. On the contrary, the application is designed to protect the catalog, and protect your image files.

But you have to know where it is. You have to have a logical folder structure that you're able to navigate in.

Well, it's months from the last post in this thread  (Dec 2018) but I've just experienced the same thing - updated LR, catalog gone, new empty one in it's place and hard drive folders empty. (sigh) I'm truly at a loss but not as bad as some of the other folks here.

If any of you have found any useful information and would care to share it, I'd gladly read it.

Had a similar (or perhaps the same) problem. The catalog on the hard drive has disappeared. The only backups I can find are one from 6 months ago and one from last year, in spite of doing a Lightroom backup every week.

It seems to have happened after I created a new catalog on an external drive and imported a lot of photos into that new catalog.

I have lost about 6 months of work on photos.  The original raw files are on my disk - just not the Lightroom catalog, and so reimporting the photos to a new catalog (or the empty one that Lightroom now offers me) does not restore any of my edits.

I lost my Lightroom catalog too, a week ago. 111,000 photos. The big Thunderbolt hard drive failed but I wasn’t worried because I have a backup copy of the masters and back up the catalog file every time I close Lightroom to a separate Thunderbolt Drive. Shockingly, the most recent backup has retained none of the work I’ve done at all. It refuses to recognize the masters in a different location, and I tried reconnecting them almost day by day (since 2002). Adobe support couldn’t help, just told me to “show parent folder, reconnect masters”. After several hours of this I thought I was getting somewhere, and hoping that my keywords and ratings and collections would be there at the end, but then somewhere around 2010 all the more recent folders just vaporized from the left column and there remains nothing left to reconnect past 2010. Mid 2010 thru 2018 are no longer even folders with question marks. I’ve started over repeatedly from the backup (which Lightroom always has to upgrade since it’s from an earlier version).  I came to the conclusion that the backups are worthless or that the most recent backup must be years old (like mid 2016) and Lightroom had started storing more recent backups to the main drive (maybe after an update). I’ve searched all the drives and the only “backups” are on the backup drive, so I have to assume it had been storing all the recent ones to the failed drive.  Why Lightroom would default to the same location as the main catalog is a mystery to me, because who stores their backup on the same drive as the original? There should at least be a warning if it’s going to do that. I looked into data recovery just for that one catalog backup file, if it’s even there, but that costs a fortune on a 6 Tb drive, and everything else important had been backed up. It has taken me since mid 2015 to recover from the debacle of migrating from Aperture (using the prescribed migration instructions at the time) which ended up entailing completely reorganizing, re-rating, and re-keywording about 60,000 photos that had ballooned to about 111,000 photos because Lightroom made 2 - 6 duplicates of any photo I had ever adjusted, keyworded or altered in any way in Aperture. All my synced collections are gone from the library, all keywording, rating, color coding, adjustments, organization and synced collections are just gone. If I sync a new library all mobile collections will be deleted, and it took me years to build them. A vast amount of work on over 100,000 photos evaporated. I’m now trying to figure out how to start over.  It’s heartbreaking and massively disappointing. I feel like I did everything right, backing up every time I closed. Just be forewarned if you haven’t tried to recover from a backup. You have no idea what Lightroom’s doing. Better make a copy of the catalog yourself every so often to be sure, because the backup might be useless. I sure wish there were a simpler, better photo management solution. Aperture was vastly better. I have too many photos to store in the cloud, or I would just put the whole collection on Apple Photos. Lightroom CC is also not an option.

Similar thing happened to me. I opened Lightroom and there were only a few folders showing with blank photos in them. Hadn't edited anything in them for over a year. Recent folders were not shown. Only blank files were in the folders. I had not reset any preferences. The only change I did from my normal routine was to synchronise some folders, the night before after learning how to do it on YouTube. Don't know if this caused the problem. I'd also downloaded the latest update for my Macrium Reflect Backup software and installed it, just before opening Lightroom.

I tried searching for the files but mistakenly read lrcat as ircat so obviously it didn't find any files.

Fixed the problem by doing a search for 'lightroom backup' and got results - chose the most recent catalogue and lightroom opened with them all there.

Hope this helps someone.

Same sad story as everyone one else.  My new catalog disappeared with the update.  Searched my hard drive for lrcat files and it's gone.  Hours of organizing my photos wasted and an hour calling adobe tech wasted.  Frustrating.

If you go to C;\users\username\LightroomCatalogueData you should find a folder called backups which is full of dated folders which contain zip files of you catalogs. If that makes sense and you find what you are looking for then hooray. Unzip the one you want, and then open it in Lightroom. That will then become your current catalog.