Elements Organizer 14 and 2019 on Mac OS Keep Switching to Time Machine

I am thinking that it is because the PSE catalogue location is in a location that IS being backed up by Time Machine - would it help if i excluded the catalogue location from Time Machine as well?

As I mentioned before, I don't use Macs, but if I understand a little why Time Machine fools the organizer and OneDrive by switching to and from its own location, the first thing to do would be to exclude the catalog folder from the scope of Time Machine.

Either you set your Time Machine settings or you move the catalog folder under a folder which is not covered by TM.

The catalog location is to be found by the menu 'Help >> System Information'. You can only move it from the Finder. Once it is moved, either you navigate in the Catalog manager to the new location, or you double click (or the Mac equivalent) on the 'catalog.pse18db' file to open the organizer with the moved catalog.

I have uploaded a video to YouTube discussing this issue and the workaround that I mentioned above:

How to fix “Reconnect Missing Files” TimeMachine issue with Adobe Elements Organiser - YouTube

It was my first time using Adobe Premier Elements, so the editing is pretty basic, but I hope someone finds it useful.

Ok, I've tested out the workaround. I now have my Adobe Catalog and Media files on my Mac's internal hard disk, in a separate logical volume, and I can import files from my camera no problem while there is a TimeMachine backup of the main volume in progress. This workaround is acceptable for my use case, which is using Adobe Elements to pull in photos and video off my camera/SD card, use Organiser to manage the media and do some post-production. There may be some use cases where it is not as good a fit.

So, to answer some of the questions that came after my post:

-   Is it worth using TimeMachine to back up your catalog and media? I would not really recommend this, as you are liable to end up in a situation where the media files and catalog information are not consistent. I suggest to use the backup capability of Organiser to write out the catalog + media to an external drive, completely independently of TimeMachine. I still recommend to use TimeMachine to back up the main volume of your Mac -- this has served me well in the past when I had a Mac die, and it is especially important since the SSD drives in these Macs are now soldered directly to the motherboard -- if there is any problem in your Mac, you will probably lose your data. Having a TimeMachine backup of the main volume and a backup export from Organiser for your catalog + media will ensure you can go to the Apple store, buy a replacement Mac, and get back to where you were (ie. import the TImeMachine backup to the new Mac, then use Organiser to import the catalog and media from the Organiser backup archive).

  Note: I don't say that taking a TimeMachine backup of your media files is completely useless -- if you are working on a project it could help prevent you losing some work-in-progress in between exports, and any conflicts that arise with the catalog can be resolved manually, but it just brings us back to the TimeMachine snapshot issue that is the topic of the original post.

- Why does Elements Organiser behave in this way? My guess is that it is to do with the Watched Folder feature -- normally you would set up Organiser to watch your media folder, so that any new files added in there are automatically catalogued. Maybe if you don't use that feature and instead do a periodic scan of your media directory, you can also avoid this TimeMachine snapshot problem -- I didn't bother to test it, but this is potentially an alternative workaround that may be more appropriate for some other use cases.

- Is this the fault of Apple or Adobe? In my view, Adobe should be in a position to implement a fix for this in their software. The fact that they haven't done so despite the fact this issue was reported many releases ago suggests to me that they don't take this hobbyist market segment very seriously, and that their priorities lie more with the professional market and their cloud-based offerings.

Anyway, I'm happy to have found a work-around for this issue.

Ok, I think I see what is going on.

When you open Adobe Elements Organiser, it will open the directory where your media files are stored and keep it open.

Now TImeMachine comes and wants to make a backup of your system. It will create a snapshot of your Mac's disk, like a frozen point in time, and mount it on /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/blahblahblah. Abode Elements Organiser still has the directory open, which is now frozen as part of this snapshot.

Now you import some new files from your camera. They get copied from the camera into your media file directory, but it is the directory on the live harddisk, not the frozen copy captured in the snapshot. The files are copied onto your harddisk, and the catalog is updated with the new filenames. Organiser now looks for these new files you just imported, but it is referring to the open filehandle on the directory that is now frozewn in the snapshot. Organiser complains that it can't see the new files in the directory it has open (since it is referring to a frozen snapshot taken before the files were copied from the camera) and then it complains that the files cannot be found. In the error message, it tells you the name of the directory it is looking into, based on the open filehandle it has, and this refers to the frozen snapshot that TimeMachine made of your harddisk, so you see in the error that it cannot find the file in the open directory at /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/... etc..

If you close Organiser and reopen it, the catalog is still referring to filenames based on the snapshot name, and so the files are still "missing". However, if you close Organiser, and stop the backup, then reopen Organiser, the snapshot directory is gone, and Organiser will try to reconnect your files by searching on the live harddisk. This time it finds the files, and the file connections are rebuilt.

So, what can we do? Basically, we want to store the media files on a disk or partition somewhere where TimeMachine won't be creating snapshots to back up the filesystem. Excluding the Adobe Elements directory from timemachine backups won't help, because a snapshot impacts all files/directories on the filesystem, regardless whether TimeMachine is going to make a copy or not.

So, easiest solution would be to store your media files on an external drive, and don't use TimeMachine to back up that drive. Instead, use the backup facility of Adobe Elements Organiser to do your backups to another external drive. You could probably also create a new logical APFS Volume on your internal harddisk, sharing the same container as your existing volume, and don't do TimeMachine backups on that second volume. This means no snapshots on the Adobe media directory, and so no problems to use Organiser while TimeMachine backs up your main volume. When I find some time I might give it a go and see if it works as I expect.

I am not a Mac user, but I remember old posts by expert Barbara Brundage about not trusting Time Machine with Elements.

A quick search on the net with "forums.adobe.come ; time machine" gives at least two warnings;

reactivation after time machine restore

Applications not working after Mac Time Machine restore

If restoration through Time Machine is not possible for Adobe softwares, that's already a major problem.

In your case, I can't know exactly what is different with Windows, but the way the Organizer interacts with the OS to recognize drives is full of traps in Windows. I suspect there may be some incompatibility with time machine which makes the organizer be fooled to identify the current drive. As I said, I don't know Macs, but I seem to remember from other old posts that it was not possible to work at the same time with Time Machine and the organizer.

What does work is to use the organizer for the library and catalog, particularly for moving to a new computer and to use other softwares for disk backups or cloning. In my experience, it's very imprudent to trust a backup and restore system without testing it in a real situation. The trouble is that for such a test, you would ideally need a trusted backup before testing... which could be a real disk cloning.