Catalog Backup Froze

[alyshak78573316]

My Lightroom has been running incredibly slow the past few days. I cannot get anything done and it's driving me crazy. I figured I needed an update so I closed out my Lightroom and began backing up my catalog. Well, my catalog has been backing up for over five hours now and it's froze just on the tail end of the backup. I decided to cancel it because I couldn't do anything on my computer until this was out of the way. Now it's froze on canceling and it won't cancel. I have so much wedding work saved in this catalog and I really don't want to have to start over. What can I do at this point?! 

{Moved from Lightroom Cloud to Lightroom Classic Forum by Moderator} 

[Sameer K]

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. We are sorry for the trouble with Lightroom Classic. We are here to help.

Could you please share the Lightroom Classic version and the operating system you are working on?

Where is the catalog stored? Is it on the internal drive or an external/network drive? Where is the catalog backup being is directed to be saved?

You can create a new test catalog and merge the existing one with the new one to avoid broken or damaged databases. Copy the primary catalog or the catalog in question and place it on your computer's desktop/internal drive.

• When launching Lightroom Classic, press the Alt (Win) or OPT (macOS).
• Choose the option to create a new catalog and create a new one on the internal drive.

• In the new catalog, head to File > Import from Another Catalog, as shown below.

Proceed with merging the corrupted catalog into the newly made, internal storage-based catalog. 

For more help via video-based steps, check here. See Merging individual catalogs into a master catalog. 

Then try to take a backup of the new catalog we just made. Let us know if this works.

Thanks!

Sameer K

[Abambo]

What I'm doing in such cases: I'm backing-up my catalogue manually. Indeed, the automatic back-up “only” optimizes the catalogue and then copies this to a new location and zips that.

After the manual back-up, restart your machine, start Lightroom and try the “Optimize Catalog…” feature. If that fails, delete the preview data of your Lightroom catalogue (Whatever-your-catalog-name[SPACE]Previews.lrdata). They will rebuild on the fly when needed. These files are needed for performance reasons only.