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Question

Catalogue backup fails - so trying to import into a new catalogue

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
January 2, 2024
2 replies
324 views

Hi,

My backups have been failing for the last few weeks so the most recent backup is a month out of date.

Backup fails with
Please check your folder permissions, and make sure you have available space on your backup drive and main catalogue's drive.

Optimise works but the integrity check may be failing but I don't get any error messages. And the backup fails even with optimise and/or integrity check ticks on or off.

I have permission, I have plenty of local drive space. The catalogue updated from v12 to v13 but it worked for a few weeks before failing.

I have tried running as administrator. I have tried various internal drives. I have between 1Tb and 500Gb on the original and alternate drives. My catalogue is 2.6Gb with approx 250k images and the odd video. Caches have been cleared.

I have found a few similar posts but they are at least 1 year ago and didn't provide a working solution.

So I have started to create a new catalogue and then importing my old catalogue into the new one. I have copied the failing catalogue and have it safe on a drive.

The new catalogue was created but it has 0 images inside but shows the correct number in the catalogue.. Is this normal?? Most but not all of the keywords are showing but each with 0 files.

It seems that most of my Collections are there but I have no images. So it seems that I need to synch the new catalogue to my file locations so as to import the images into the new catalogue? The files are all in the original location. I started the import process and it gradually ticked up to include all images. But I haven't hit the final IMPORT button. Will I lose my edits ? and my images be synch'd into the correct file structure locations or all into one massive file? The retain original was selected - but all other options were grayed out.

Is this normal? When I imported I had expected the old folders and images to be present. And will my edits, ratings and colour tabs be there?

This whole process seems to be quite vague as to details.

Help and guidance would be appreciated.

Windows

This topic has been closed for replies.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

I am sorry to say, but it sounds like your catalog corruption was already too severe to make this work, or you made a mistake with the import dialog (let's hope it's just that). I don't know if this is just a coincidence, but I advised somebody with the same problem just a few days ago that importing the old catalog into a brand new one might solve his problem. In his case, it did indeed. Here's the link. Read what I write about the import setting for new images. https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-discussions/can-t-save-my-lightroom-catalog/m-p/14327423#M351026

-- Johan W. Elzenga

P

PenihauAuthor

Participant

Hi,

Thank you for the replies.

re GoldingD

Hi,

Thank you for the reply.

The catalogue xxxxlrcat is 2.694Gb.

The LRcat-data is 82Mb

The sync.lrdata is 67Mb

Smartpreviews.lrdata is 7.7Gb

previews.lrdata is 267Gb

helper.lrdata is 362Mb

I have 396Gb free on cache and high speed internal SSD where I usually perform my backups to

I have 579Gb free on C: drive where app and catalogue are installed. I tried backing up to here also

I have also tried

😧 drive with 4.83 TB free

E: drive 2.62Tb free

1.24Tb free on another internal SSD

As I mentioned I have cleared cache's.

Thank you for your suggestion

The catalogue xxxxlrcat is 2.694Gb.

The LRcat-data is 82Mb

The sync.lrdata is 67Mb

Smartpreviews.lrdata is 7.7Gb

previews.lrdata is 267Gb

helper.lrdata is 362Mb

I have 396Gb free on cache and high speed internal SSD where I usually perform my backups to

I have 579Gb free on C: drive where app and catalogue are installed. I tried backing up to here also

I have also tried

😧 drive with 4.83 TB free

E: drive 2.62Tb free

1.24Tb free on another internal SSD

As I mentioned I have cleared cache's.

Thank you for your suggestion

re Johan,

Thank you for the suggestion, I am going through this carefully and will advise back.

cheers and Happy New Year

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Hi,

Thank you for your reply. I seem to have most of my library recovered.

I have many images that now have a double that cannot be found if I select it. Many show ' ! ' in top corner. It is livable but a major pain to sort out each time. Any way of pruning these?

I do not have the People View data - People View is completely unpopulated and I am being asked to start from scratch. Is there any way of recovering and importing the People View data? The old catalogue was fully completed for all images. Does anyone have any way of recovering or importing. ?

Thank you in advance

If you have a double image and Lightroom shows the exclamation mark, then Lightroom does not even know where the original image is located. I would simply remove such an image from the catalog. As you created a new catalog, people view may not be activated yet for this catalog. The data should have been imported however, so activating it might be enough to repopulate it. Otherwise you could try the import again with another new catalog, and this time activate people view for the new catalog before you start the import.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

GoldingD

Legend

I probably have a bit of this wrong, or part of this may have changed over the years. But

Their can be (actually should be) two hard drives, two places, that could be lacking enough space to accomplish the backup.

1. The hard drive your catalog is on. And consider one file and one folder in the backup:

Both the catalog, and the lrcat-data folder will be included in the backup. How much space does your catalog need? How big is it?

And as for the lrcat-data

How much space does your eat up?

Add those together.

The other drive is the one you are attempting to backup to

And that backup (compressed) is one I just crated for this discussion, (that uis to say, do not wonder about the strange hard drive description, not my normal process) so you can see that it eats quite a bit of space. If I was to double click on that, I would see both the catalog and the lrcat_data folder.

Moving on,

1. One would assume your and LrC rights (more of a MACOS issue, LrC rights) to the hard drive your catalog is on are just fine, but what about the hard drive you are importing to?

2. How much space on that hard drive you are backing up to?

3. Now this is a bit I may have wrong. While that backup file is compressed and as such takes up less space than the original, At some point does LrC copy the file to the backup drive and then compress? Or does it compress during the copy to the backup drive? Could the backup process require at least at first the full drive space as the original? When checking for free space, keep that in mind. Could be wrong.

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