What do I do when my catalog has more than 4 Gigs and I can't retrieve it?

[carolelehrman]

When I tried to back up the catalog, I couldn't because it's larger than 4 gigs.  I have a Macbook pro and the latest version of lightroom.  I saw the directions on your website but didn't really understand what to do.

[ManiacJoe]

Did the backup actually fail?

The warning message says you will need to download a third-party compression utility to unzip a file bigger than 4 gig.

[Rob_Cullen · Accepted solution]

Quote from:

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/whats-new-lightroom-cc-2015-8-6-8/

Catalogs larger than 4GB are now zipped again, but they’re too big for macOS to unzip natively, so you’ll need 7-zip or StuffItExpander if you need to restore a backup.