Troubleshooting LRC corrupted catalog

… but I can’t seem to find one for this particular catalog. It seems weird to me that most catalogs would auto-back up but not this one.

Do a search, using your operating system’s search feature, for all files whose name is the same as the file name (but not file type) of your corrupted catalog and the file type is .ZIP. So if your catalog name is “Lightroom 2026 Catalog”, then search for Lightroom 2026 Catalog.zip. Please use your operating system to search all folders on all disks.

Move the corrupted catalog to another folder. Then Lightroom Classic won’t know anymore where it is, and so it can’t open it automatically.

First of all, having a catalog for each year is not generally considered a good strategy.  

What catalog opens when you click an LrC icon is a global setting the the “Preferences” menu.  If you have a specific catalog specified or you have “Load most recent catalog” (which is the default setting) then Lrc will keep trying to open the last catalog used which in this case is the corrupted 2026 one.   If you use Finder or File Explorer to navigate to a specific, not corrupted catalog searching for  “<catalogname>.lrcat” and double click on it, then LrC will open that specific catalog.  Once it is open you can change the preference to “prompt me when starting lightroom”.

As for “On Exit” backups, that is a Catalog Setting unique to each catalog so it is entirely possible that one catalog prompts to do the backup on every exit and another catalog never prompts. Where those backups are saved is also unique to each catalog.  Search your system using your OS for a folder whose name is <YourCatalogName>.zip”  that should find backups from your 2026 catalog.