Re-sync Lightroom Mobile after restoring catalog (without Delete All)?

[davefeldman]

I ran into an issue with my Lightroom catalog, so I replaced it with a recent backup. Now I'm getting this error when I try to sync with Lightroom Mobile:

This appears to be a duplicate or automatically created backup of your catalog.  As it may not be current, sync has been disabled for this catalog.  Please open your production catalog to resume sync. To make this your sync catalog, go to: Lightroom > Preferences > Lightroom mobile and click the “Delete All Data” button to start fresh.

By "start fresh" I presume it means delete everything in the cloud. I have 17,000 photos in Lightroom Mobile, some of which are direct-uploaded from my phone. Starting fresh would take forever, probably exceed my data cap, possibly lose some photos that aren't yet in the catalog, break links I've sent to others, and leave me in more or less exactly the same state I'm in now. This isn't a new catalog, it's just a slightly modified version of the one that was already syncing.

So I'm really hoping there's another option where I can just tell it to pick up where it left off? Please?

Thanks in advance.

[davefeldman · Accepted solution]

I was able to solve this without re-uploading everything by quitting Lightroom and deleting its cache folder at /Users/<username>/Library/Caches/Adobe/Lightroom. (I believe it's just the Sync Data/Sync.lrdata file inside that folder that matters, but I wiped out the whole thing; if you're feeling cautious maybe just start with that file.)

I did some basic checks after it re-synced and things look good: recent uploads from mobile account for the additional photos in Mobile Uploads. The only discrepancy was exactly the number of photos in my last import, which happened post-backup (and therefore post-restore). That makes sense and actually gives me more confidence: I'd re-imported into the restored catalog, but those photos had already synced to LR Mobile, which played it safe and just duplicated them. With that understanding, the total number of photos before and after lines up.

I did a chat support with someone at Adobe, who seemed to think that removing Sync.lrdata would be effective but still cause a complete re-sync. Given how quickly this resolve itself after I deleted the cache, I believe he was wrong.

I also had an exchange with Adobe Support on Twitter, in which they seem to endorse this approach. I'm not sure why they don't just list it as the preferred solution here: asking a cloud-service customer to wipe out everything and start over seems unreasonable, especially when hundreds of GB are in play and a faster, simpler method exists.

[Thresha]

I just ran into the same error myself after LightRoom crashed when moving some photos.

I was not restoring from backups and did not wish to.

I found the path on my machine was \Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Adobe\Lightroom\Caches\Sync Data\Sync.lrdata

I deleted just the Sync.lrdata directory and that solved it for me.

Lightroom is now re-syncing the photo's but everything appears as I left it.

Very glad I ran across this post as I agree, the other suggestions I found were rather unreasonable. Thank you very much for updating your post with the resolution!

[ConradS1]

Do you know where this is located in Windows 10?

Thanks,

Conrad

[BillLeePhoto]

In WIndows 10, you can find it C:\Users\<userid>\AppData\Local\Adobe\Lightroom\Caches\Sync Data\Sync.lrdata. In explorer, enter: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Adobe\Lightroom\Caches\Sync Data\Sync.lrdata to get yourself there.