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Good afternoon.
I use Creative Cloud Lightroom Classic (Release 10.1.1). The main catalog is on the Mac Drive and I backup to an external hard drive. The latter was originally formatted to MS-DOS (FAT 32) but the catalog now exceeds the 4GB limit for this format so I have reformatted it to MAC OS Extended (Journal).
Now when I exit Lightroom and choose the catalog backup option the normal progress bar appears but only completes to about 75% before it stops for a while and then restarts the process again. This keeps on repeating and the only way to get Lightroom to close is to choose the cancel option. After doing this I've checked the external drive and a .lrcat file is there which is slightly larger than that shown in the Lightroom Catalog Settings. I haven't tried to verify that this backup would work if something were to happen to the original.
My questions:
1. Is this expected behaviour, am I doing something wrong, or am I just being stupid?
2. In particular is there any was I can get Lightroom to close itself when the backup is completed?
3. Is there a better way of backing up a 4GB+ catalogon a Mac?
Apologies if this has been asked before - I've looked at various threads but they either go above my head or don't answer my specific problems. Any help, preferably in patient simple terms, would be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks.. Mark
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Do you have the optoin "Optimize catalog after backup" checked?
have you manually tried to optimize the catalog lately? File->Optimize Catalog
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Hi.
Many thanks for this suggestion which seems to have solved the immediate problem. Please see my reply to Bob Somrak's message for fuller details.
Thanks again.
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Change the backup to the internal drive and see if it works there. That would eliminate a LrC backup or catalog problem. If that works than report back here and maybe we can get the external drive backup issue resolved.
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Hi Bob
Tried backup to Mac internal drive (APFS Format). The catalog was both backed-up and compressed ending up with a .zip file of just less than 3GB. LR then closed automatically. It was very slow, but at least it worked. Got the sameresult backing up to the external drive using the Optimise Catalog option as suggested by dj_paige. At least it seems to be working ok in that I don't have to cancel operations in order to get LR to close. Guess I may just have to be more patient and accept that working on a 4+ GB takes time, even on a relatively new and well-spec'd machine.
Thanks for your help.
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Glad you got it working!!