Lightroom crashes, catalog can't be repaired and I've lost my latest work

[stepbar]

For some reason my LR is constantly hanging, crashing, aborting etc.  When it happens, the LR process will not shut down, even through task manager and it prevents my PC from shutting down, meaning I have to power it off.

Even sometimes when it appears to close properly when I next open the catalog it says the catalog is corrupt and tries to repair it, always failing to do so.  When this happens I could have lost hours worth of work as I have to roll back to a backup (luckily I've learned to take regular backups).  This has been happening for a long time now that I really need to get to the bottom of the problem.

I've even rebuilt my PC from scratch in case there was something causing the corruptions, but it still happens.

The other problem is that I have a number of plugins, two of which I rely on: The Lightroom To Alamy bridge, and Midi2LR.  I've tried disabling these but I'm still getting the problem.

I've lost so much work in the past that I really need to understand why it's doing what it's doing!  Are there any diagnostic tools, SQL Lite utilities or log files that I can look at?

Help!

[Akash Sharma]

HI Step-bar,

We're sorry that you're facing issues using Lightroom.

May I know which version of Lightroom are you using?

Please send us the corrupt catalog via PM(Upload to Dropbox and PM me the link)

You may also refer this article How to recover from a corrupt Lightroom Catalog | Obsessive Coffee Disorder

Thanks,

Akash

[stepbar]

Thanks Akash,

I was looking for something like this, but fixed it manually.  Still, I've kept this information just in case it occurs again!

[Akash Sharma]

Feel free to update this discussion anytime. We'll be happy to help.

~Akash

[dj_paige]

If the catalog is constantly needing repair, then most likely you have a hard disk malfunction. Try moving the catalog file to a different disk and see if the problems go away.

[stepbar · Accepted solution]

Thanks.  That was one of the first things I checked - ran the Windows disk error checker as well as SpinRite.  Nothing wrong with the drive.  There are a number of actual data corruptions within the database file: I managed to isolate them, then exported photos as a catalog in sections, avoiding the areas where the corruptions were.  Finally, I created a new catalog and imported all the bits, before synchronising the folders to eventually bring everything back in under one roof.  It did take quite a bit of effort and detective work, but was easier than having to re-keyword and re-caption 40,000 images.

It's all been working fine ever since.