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rayo70575913
Participating Frequently
June 13, 2017
Question

Recovered LRCAT files but not working

  • June 13, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 904 views

LIGHTROOM CC

Hi Im new here so bare with me if you don't mind.

Great place by the way.

So somehow my catalog file went missing without my knowledge and to make things worse, the whole folder which contains the .lrcat file as well as the regular backs was deleted. I tried not panicking and did some research and found out about Disk Drill which is suppose be able to recover them. Now DD finds more than a dozen .lrcat files and i recovered all of them to a seperate drive to avoid rewriting to the same drive. Problem is Lightroom won't open any of them 😕😕  First i get an error saying "Unexpected Error Opening Catalog"  then i try opening it from the SELECT CATALOG window while "test Integrity of this Catalog" is ticked and i get another error saying "The Lightroom Catalog ... is corrupt and cannot be used or backed until repaired"

I click on Repair Catalog and then i get a final error saying "Lightroom encountered problems reading or writing from disk when attempting to repair .."

I also tried importing those recovered catalogs to a new catalog but to no avail because an error msgs comes up and says "The catalog does not appear to be a valid Lightroom catalog"

I tried opening those recovered lrcat files through TEXT EDITOR and compare it to a working catalog, and I'm no programmer but they seem very similarly written to suggest that really is a lrcat file.

Has anyone experienced anything like this or would know how to properly repair a recovered lrcat file?

Any Help would greatly be appreciated it.

Thanks in advance everyone

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    Mohit Goyal
    Community Manager
    Mohit GoyalCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    June 13, 2017

    Hi rayo,

    Can you let us know the file size for the .Lrcat file you found using the disk drill? also, the error you are getting while opening or merging the catalog it's because some part of that file is still missing or corrupt.

    You can also refer the below discussion related to the same issue.

    https://www.lightroomforums.net/threads/my-lr-catalog-backups-are-corrupt.18912/

    Regards,

    Mohit

    R
    rayo70575913Author
    Participating Frequently
    June 13, 2017

    Thanks for the reply Mohit

    Ok the size of the lrcat files that i found ranged from a few megabytes all the way to over 800MB which i think is the relevant file. because like i said I had recovered more than just a couple of that files, but most of them are over 500mb. i think the one i would need is the one around 800mb because i had a similar file for last year and its about that size.

    Mohit Goyal
    Community Manager
    Mohit GoyalCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    June 14, 2017

    Was you backing up the catalog file somewhere may on cloud or on any external resource, because the files you have found is not the complete file that's why you was unable to open it into Lightroom. You can share one of the catalog with us via Dropbox download link and we can try open it at our end.

    Regards,

    Mohit

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