how to best merge 2 lightroom catalogues?

[john5FF2]

a while back i had a devastating hard drive crash, with no backup. the crashed drive contained a lightroom catalogue on some old lr version (don't know which). i then moved on to a new version and new photos, having recovered some from the crashed drive before it became unrecognizable.

i have now hired a data recovery service that found a lot of the data on the crashed drive.

how do i best go about merging the two lr catalogues to one? obviously i would like to not lose the latest retouches on each photo?

[dj_paige]

Open one catalog in Lightroom Classic, then File->Import from Another Catalog

[john5FF2]

wonderfully simple. if i do that, what's going to happen to the pictures that have adjustments on both of the catalogues?

[dj_paige]

In the case where photos have adjustments in both catalogs, you get choices about what to do. See section 5 here: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/import-photos-various-sources.html#import_photos_from...

[john5FF2]

lr is smarter than i thought. the catalogue is so big that i can't check each photo individually, but by creating virtual copies i'll have the best of both worlds (in this case, catalogues).

[JohanElzenga]

Did you check that the recovered catalog can be opened in Lightroom? Lightroom catalogs are notoriously hard to recover. Usually recovery fails.

[john5FF2]

yes, the recovered catalogue opens. i guess i'm in luck in this respect.

[gary_sc]

If nothing else, I do hope others learn from your mishap the value of backups.

I have all of my photos on an external hard drive. I have a 2nd hard drive that I back up the first hard drive. (I have a 3rd hard drive that I use for Time Machine.) My computer and my primary hard drive are backed up via a cloud service. About 4 months ago my primary hard drive died and I did not lose a single thing. While inconvenient and frustrating, it was not devastating.

Simply, there are two kinds of computer users: those who've had a hard drive crash and those who've not had a hard drive crash yet. Welcome to the club!

[john5FF2]

no excuse, but the crashed drive was so big that it was hard to back up, 2tb. but yes, now i've wisened the hard way.

[gary_sc]

Mine are 4 TB. 

You do not state if you are on a Mac or PC but if you are Mac based I STRONGLY recommend Chronosync. This is by far the best backup software out there (at least on the Mac side of things, I have no clue about the PC side but I'm sure there will be recommendations coming out of floorboards and ceilings for you on that. 

One other thing I do is that I keep my catalog in the same master folder that also contains my images on the external drive. This does slow things down a tad but to me the convenience of having everything all together is worth the ever so slight loss of speed.

[JohanElzenga]

 My photo disk is 16 TB. I make two backups of the disk each time new photos were added. My catalog resides on the internal disk. It gets backed up multiple times.

[DS256]

This may be a useful reference https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom/catalogs/merging/