P: Ability to lock photos to prevent further editing

I only work with RAW images in Lightroom.  In the past, I have accidentally deleted my catalog and had to start over with a new catalog and lost my changes made to my RAW files.  Is there a way to "lock" or prevent changes being made to the RAW file after you have worked on them?  This would prevent changes being wiped if you had to start a new catalog.

Fully agree LR should have a lock image option, but Adobe is becoming increasingly weird with LRC / ACR / PS.

Meanwhile - did anyone try simly locking image and xmp in the Finder?

When I shoot a multi-day event for a client, I often edit a handful of images very quickly to deliver as fast as possible for their immediate needs (this is known as delivering "dailys"). I then go back the next day or two and edit the rest of the photos and deliver them separately.

Sometimes, when I come back to edit the remainder of the photos, I have already edited an image in a certain way that is different from how I'll edit the rest of the images, so that I wouldn't want any synchronized image adjustments to apply to those "daily" specific photos I've already edited and delivered to the client.

I would like to "lock" individual images from any later adjustments having an effect on that image. This would avoid any mistaken edits that I didn't want to happen. The worst is when you've accidently editied something and you can't get it back or remember how you edited it. The image "lock" would be extremely valuable.

after 7 years of using Lightroom I have at present over 340’000 images in my Lightroom Classic version.
many more images rest on my 3 units of Drobo 5D which I have deleted out of the catalog of LrC to keep the catalog smaller.

while cleaning up to free disk space it is possible to make mistakes and delete images I need to keep for ever or especially when deleting older images out of the LrC catalog where I do not really remember the story or I did not yet Flag properly during my learning period. 

example: I make a book with a few hundreds of images in Lr.
months later l happen to accidentally delete some images while not beeing on the book module. 
this should not be possible as long as my book is still kept in Lr. 
or l mark some images one day for ever to be kept and months later l accidentally delete some of them while cleaning up my forlders. should be blocked by Lr as I am working in Lr.

of course I have the images flagged, coloured, starred etc. I have 2 full backups to my RAID system. I backup catalog every day etc.
I know and do Flag images to keep them or Flag images to XX them. but in fact even a Flagged image to keep can be easily deleted. and I know I can block images from deleting via the OS of my computer. but I am not talking about this.

of course I know I can go to my backups and search for the deleted files and copy them back to the original drive. but sometimes the work is very time consuming.

my wish after all these years of using Lightroom ?
Adobe programmers to make an additional FLAG to BLOCK an image from intentional/unintentional deleting preventing so deleting an image. only after the FLAG has been neutralised the image can be deleted. It should be a normal Lightroom FLAG. in the same spot as the other flags are shown. and make a FILTER command for this BLOCK FLAG.

I think it is an easy programming step to help all the users of Lightroom to prevent deleting images by mistake.

what do you think ?

btw: I am a professional photographer serving media with images.

Giancarlo Cattaneo, Switzerland