LrC: "Back Up Catalog": Ambiguous red warning after moving Lightroom folder to external disk

[shutterfreak]

Environment: LrC 14.3.1 on macOS Sonoma 14.7.6.

I moved my LrC catalog (actually, ~/Pictures/Lightroom/) to an external disk on which I store my pictures, so I could attach the disk to another computer when needed.

Steps:

1. Ensure LrC is not running
2. In Finder, create the target folder on the external disk (/Volumes/ExternalDiskName/Lightroom)
3. Open Terminal.app
4. Type: cd ~/Pictures/Library/
5. Type: cp -pr * /Volumes/ExternalDiskName/Lightroom/
6. Type: cd ..
7. Type: mv Lightroom __old__Lightroom
8. Open LrC (note: in the previous step we renamed the local copy of the Lightroom folder so LrC would not find it)
9. Verify that you can access the images
10. Optional: move locally store files to external disk
11. Close LrC or open back up dialog (in my case, the last time I backed up the catalog was >1 week, so the backup dialog appeared when closing LrC)

When closing LrC the "Back Up Catalog" dialog appeared, with an ambiguous red warning. The weird thing is that the dialog correctly states "Backup folder: `/Volumes/mountedExternalDisk/Lightroom/Backups`" but I get a red message below this stating "The previously selected backup folder is not available. Catalog folder will be used for backup. Location: /Users/username/Pictures/Lightroom/backups".

Even when explicitly choosing `/Volumes/mountedExternalDisk/Lightroom/Backups` from within the dialog the red warning stays.

However, if I proceed backing up, the backup is correctly stored on the new location on the external disk.

To me it appears that LrC is confused after moving the folder containing the LrC catalog and backup folder. I would expect the red warning to disappear after explicitly setting (confirming) the updated backup folder location.

[JohanElzenga]

I'm not sure if that has something to do with this, but why this complicated copy process using the Terminal? You can move or copy a catalog folder in the Finder just fine. To let Lightroom Classic start with the catalog in the new location, either use 'File - Open Catalog', or launch Lightroom Classic by double clicking the new catalog file. You only need to do that once if your settings are that Lightroom Classic should open the most recent catalog.

[shutterfreak]

Dear Johan,

Thanks for your reply. I know that I can copy a Lightroom catalog folder in the Finder in macOS but when I do so the file attributes are not preserved and the copy takes significantly longer than on the command line (which I use daily).

My main question is that once I copied the catalog to an external disk, that an error is shown in red text, and that error seems to be out of sync with the current situation, resulting in end user confusion. Eventually it turned out that the error texts in red, albeit very prominent, were apparently irrelevant in my case.