Lightroom Classic Catalogue Error - Unable to be Repaired

[Gfrench]

Good Morning!

I have an issue with my Lightroom Catalogue in that Lightroom can not open it. I tried repairing it and received a prompt to reach out to Adobe Support.

Any suggestions on recovering the images and edits stored in my catalogue without reimporting them?

Best Regards,

Gfrench

[dj_paige]

Any suggestions on recovering the images and edits stored in my catalogue without reimporting them?

The images are not in the catalog, so recovering those is not necessary, they are on your hard disk. You need to restore a recent backup copy of your catalog file to recover the edits.

Re-importing causes Lightroom Classic to consider these to be brand new photos that it has never seen before and so these photos will have no edits and no user-supplied metadata.

[Gfrench]

Right, that is why I want to recover the catalogue. Any hints on how to access the backups?

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

You find where the backup catalogs are stored, unzip them, and then copy the unzipped file to the folder where the current catalog is located (thereby overwriting the current catalog with the backup).

If that makes you nervous, you can copy the zipped file to a brand new empty folder and then double-click on it to open it in Lightroom Classic.

[Gfrench]

I tried this, but it didn't work very well. I recovered a very old version of my Lightroom Catalogue. I will do a search and see if I can find any newer backups as I have done several in the last week.

[Gfrench]

This has been solved. Lightroom had a secondary set of backups being saved in another location. I was able to recover my Catalogue from last week. Don't ask me why Lightroom has two places where it is saving backups, but thankfully it did.

Thanks for your help!

Best Regards,

Gfrench

[dj_paige]

@Gfrench 

Don't ask me why Lightroom has two places where it is saving backups

Lightroom Classic doesn't put backups in a secondary location on its own. YOU, the human user of Lightroom Classic, tell Lightroom Classic to make backups in a certain place. It is completely up to you where the backups go, or even if LrC will make backups. You need to have a solid strategy for making backups that you can control and remember, rather than thinking that LrC is doing something on its own.

In particular, any backups must be (MUST BE, not optional) on a different disk than the originals. Furthermore, put backups in a place where you know you can find them. On my Windows 10 computer, the backups go in F:\Lightroom Backups. I never have to scratch my head and remember the long folder name where the backups are ... they are in a folder name whose meaning is unmistakeable, and easy to remember.