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Up to a couple of weeks ago I could do my regular back-up every time after doing some work. Suddenly the same catalog I worked on last does not want to back-up when I am closing down. Some message appears regarding the size of the catalog, which is the same size from before - no add-ons. Has Lightroom made some changes regarding back-ups?
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I don't know what the answer is, but this has been discussed (and I believe solved) somewhere in this forum, the error message says something about catalogs cannot be greater than 4gb. So please search for the key parts of the exact error message wording.
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The message with 6.8 / CC 2015.8 says that the user's catalog is larger than 4 GB and everyone is seeing it even though most people's catalog is far smaller than this. If so, ignore it. If yours is this large, it just means that if your catalog becomes corrupted at some point and you need to restore from a backup, you'll need a 3rd party utility to unzip it. Don't worry about it - most likely you'll never encounter a corrupted catalog, and if you do you can download the free third party utility then. Just hit Continue and let LR back up your catalog.
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Thanks Laura. I am still confused. Before (up to last month), I have been backing up the same catalog to an external drive. I did not add any files since, other than developing some. Suddenly there is no option for backing up to another drive anymore, instead, I should just "let LR back up the catalog". How does that work? Where can I see that this
indeed happened.
Also, in the old back up process there was an automatic optimizing function. So now is not happening anymore?
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Do you mean you're not seeing a dialog like this?
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That's right. This dialog does not appear anymore. Instead there's the larger then 4GB message (see Laura above). All I can do close it down, with no apparent back-up. Or?
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On that "larger than 4 GB" message there is an option to not show it again. Check that option. You can then forget about that message. If you do that, do you get the dialog that allows you to choose the destination of the backup?
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You'll get the dialog to choose the destination of the backup firs (as well as the choice to optimize), then the 4 GB message. Just hit Continue and LR will backup your catalog. Here's my in-depth article on this 4 GB warning dialog topic.
Note that optimization is not necessary every time you back up - just do it occasionally or if you notice a slow down in performance. It's kind of like a disk defrag (and if you don't know what that means, don't worry about it.) On the other hand, always choose the option to test the integrity of the catalog.