How to restore LR photos and catalog are on a time machine external drive

[jeffreyr90889958]

My external hard drive with LR catalog and photos died and I want to restore LR from my time machine hard drive. How do I get the time machine hard drive to become main drive for my LR?

thank you

jeff

[Conrad_C]

Because you mentioned a catalog, it sounds like you’re asking about Lightroom Classic. (Your question was posted in the forum for cloud-based Lightroom, which does not use catalogs.)

You asked how to make “the time machine hard drive to become main drive for my LR.” But it isn’t possible to work directly from a Time Machine backup, because it’s in a special backup format and Apple also wants to keep backups safe from corruption. The way Apple intends Time Machine to be used is that if you need to use something that is only in the backup, you must restore it to from Time Machine to your Mac. That means copying the backup files you need from the Time Machine backup to your Mac storage. Then you can reconnect those restored folders in Lightroom Classic.

For example, in this case, if you bought a replacement hard drive, now you want to restore both your Lightroom Classic catalog folder and all folders containing original photos back to your new replacement hard drive. You could use Time Machine to restore the entire external hard drive in one step. Here is an article about how to do that.

How to restore items for an external drive that’s backed up using Time Machine (Macworld magazine)

You can also manually browse a Time Machine backup on the desktop when it’s connected, so you could also find the external hard drive’s backup in there and drag-copy the whole thing to the new external hard drive.

[jeffreyr90889958]

Thank you

[PRSCustom]

Thank you for the clear answer, Conrad C.    To make sure that I understand how it applies to my current problem, can I give you my specifics?   I'm using a Mac Pro, using Time Machine as my backup system, and Lightroom Classic.   All my photos are on one external drive and it (a G-Drive) is behaving a bit irrationally.   The seller, Western Digital, wants me to reformat it.   Restoring from the backup drive will be simple enough but I am less clear about how that will affect Lightroom Classic.   If I reformat the main photo drive and then restore it from Time Machine, will Lightroom's catalog recognize everything as if nothing happened?  Thank you!

[JohanElzenga]

Before you do anything drastic: Are you sure the external drive was backed up by Time Machine? As far as I know, Time Machine does not backup external drives by default. Did you enable the backup of this external drive?

[PRSCustom]

Oh yes, for sure.    I actually use Time Machine only for this external drive, and I use something else (Carbon Copy Cloner) for my internal Mac Pro hard drive.   Thanks Johan.

[Conrad_C]

Restoring from the backup drive will be simple enough but I am less clear about how that will affect Lightroom Classic.   If I reformat the main photo drive and then restore it from Time Machine, will Lightroom's catalog recognize everything as if nothing happened?  Thank you!

By @PRSCustom

Lightroom Classic should act as if nothing changed…if it finds every folder and file recorded by the catalog at the exact same paths it did last time it opened that catalog.

So, if you:

1. Verify that the Time Machine backup of the external G-Drive is complete and current. (You can browse it in the Finder.)

2. Reformat the drive.

3. Restore the complete backup of the drive to the reformatted external drive.

…in theory Time Machine should put everything back the way it was. After the restoration, you could do a few spot checks of the path to the catalog and image files just to make sure. If they are all in the right places, then Lightroom Classic should simply reconnect to everything.

If for some reason it doesn’t reconnect, and the catalog is full of question mark icons, then try relinking the top level parent folders(s) so that all sub-folders and images reconnect, by choosing the Find Missing Folder command that appears on the context menu for a folder (right-click or Control-click). But if the restoration went properly, this probably shouldn’t be necessary.

[PRSCustom]

Thank you Ambrosial Rose - that makes sense!