P: Cannot select E: drive for backup (Windows 7)

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I have Lightroom 3 on a newer Windows 7 PC. Two internal hard drives. My Image files and lightroom catalogs are on the C drive. I would like to backup the lightroom catalog on the other internal drive "E". When I get to the catalog backup dialog, it only goves me option on the C drive - It doe snot navigate to "E" or any external drive. It forces me to backup on the C drive. I can nevigate to other drives everywhere else in Lightroom e.g. folders. Please help.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Just to check my understanding of the issue.....when the backup dialog kicks in you should be able to see a 'Choose' button which enables choosing a different drive or folder than the default location. Assuming you see this, is the problem that when you select Choose the resulting "Browse for files or folders" dialog box does not show anything other than the stuff in your User folder on the C drive?

If so, this problem seems to crop up quite frequently (usually a Win7 issue), and can be overcome simply by typing in the full path to the required folder on your E drive, i.e. e:\My Stuff\Lightroom Backups Folder in the folder entry box at the bottom of the dialog box.

If this is not the problem, could you expand a little about what actually happens when you attempt backup?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Your understanding of the problem was right on and your solution worked.

Thanks very much.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Good to hear. Thanks for letting us know.

[dtull]

That's odd. Do you have a screenshot of a version of this folder choosing dialog that doesn't allow choosing folders on a different volume? The one I get on Windows 7 has a left hand navigation panel that allows selecting any volume in the system. Also, the expansion triangle to the right of the folder icon at the far left side of the location bar drops down a menu with a list of locations including "Computer" which allow me to navigate to any location in the system.

Note that the right hand navigation pane that would make this really easy can be toggled off in the "Organize" menu at the top left of the content area of the Window, so perhaps without that, it's merely less obvious how to get out.

Maybe there's some system configuration I'm missing that results in a less featured dialog? If I see what it looks like, it might give me more ideas. Thanks!

[john beardsworth]

Dan, I've encountered similar problems a few times with Windows users. There's a screenshot in this thread. Also here. My suspicion is that it usually occurs where lots of items are on the desktop.

John

[dtull]

Aha. While that screenshot link won't let me see the larger version without creating an account on that forum, the smaller one gives me just enough to recognize which dialog it is. This made me realize that there's been a change in this area from version 3 to the internal latest version to use a different dialog for browsing for folders.

Now, for me even the older dialog has everything accessible. It's rooted at "Desktop", but there's sub-items for Computer and Network that let me escape that part of the tree.

I see some further discussion of the problem in the thread trying to figure out what causes that dialog to present such an annoyingly constrained subset. Without being sure I can reproduce that condition, I can't be sure the issue is resolved by the change I'm seeing.

[dtull]

Ok, now I found the changes that switched away from that dialog. In the bug fix comments, I see a confirmation of the hypothesis noted in the thread linked above: "If you have too many folders on your desktop the dialog stops working and you can't navigate to anything outside your home directory. Fixed by moving to the more modern Vista-style folder browser dialog on Vista and later..."

There are apparently a couple of cases where we insert additional controls in the bottom of the dialog. Such controls are not supported by the new API, so those will still have this problem.

However, the workaround (besides entering the path by hand) is to reduce the number of items on your Desktop.

Thanks for the pointer to that thread, John. That gave me the nudge I needed to find the relevant changes.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Ah, see, you should come join us over at LRF Dan! It's one Lightroom forum where you don't need full body armour... ;-)

Here's the full size of that screenshot. http://www.lightroomqueen.com/screens... If you can find a way of reproducing and fixing it, we'll be happy bunnies. We've been tracking that one for ages but haven't managed to find a way to cause it. It's come up on the U2U from time to time too.

[dtull]

Cool, thanks for the link, Victoria. It looks like that behavior is (as John speculated in the linked thread) related to the number of items on the Desktop.

It's a behavior of the underlying OS dialog we're using. If it's a common enough problem, I can inquire about the odds of getting this adjustment into the next 3.x dot release. Let me know, we're trying to keep 3.x dot release fixes to the most critical issues. This one has a workaround, but it also sounds like a decent number of people are hitting it.

[J453]

Knowledge Based document on this issue:

Locations for import, export, and backup are limited | Lightroom 3 | Windows

[J453]

This should be addressed in Lightroom 4 public beta.