PSE 2023 crashes during full backup to external SSD

Report · May 28, 2024

Good morning.

I am running Adobe Elements 2023 Organizer, version 21.0.0, on an M1 MacBook Pro running macOS Sonoma 14.5 with 16 GB memory. I am able to do a full PSE backup on my Mac hard drive with no problems, but when I try to back it up on an external USB drive PSE crashes when it gets around 90%. Every time. The external drive is a 1 TB Western Digital My Passport SSD connected directly to the Mac via a USB C cable. When PSE crashes I get the message that Photoshop Elements has quit unexpectedly and I can restart the program or look at the crash report. The crash report is very long and doesn’t mean much to me, does anyone know what might be happening or how I would go about troubleshooting?

-Ken

Following are the first few lines of the crash report:

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Translated Report (Full Report Below)

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Process: Adobe Elements 2023 Organizer [14691]

Path: /Applications/Adobe Photoshop Elements 2023.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Elements 2023 Organizer.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Elements 2023 Organizer

Identifier: com.adobe.ElementsOrganizer2023

Version: 21.0 (20221211.Git.e2023-mas.44f6fc5) (21.0.0)

Code Type: ARM-64 (Native)

Parent Process: launchd [1]

User ID: 501

Date/Time: 2024-05-28 07:15:56.3048 -0400

OS Version: macOS 14.5 (23F79)

Report Version: 12

Anonymous UUID: 51CC1924-F3BB-FACE-899F-339C40AA3651

Sleep/Wake UUID: 912A898E-4C9E-4582-9779-DF39F407C0FB

Time Awake Since Boot: 100000 seconds

Time Since Wake: 896 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)

Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Termination Reason: Namespace SIGNAL, Code 6 Abort trap: 6

Terminating Process: Adobe Elements 2023 Organizer [14691]

Application Specific Information:

abort() called

Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Report · May 29, 2024

Hello Ken.

I have the same problem, but on PSE 2024 and a Macbook Air and a Sandisk external SSD. My MacBook Air has the M3 chip and only 8GB RAM.

It sounds exactly the same, except I'm transferring from an old tired Windows Laptop with 2024 version of PSE to the shiny new MAC 2024 version of PSE. I've tried Adobe support, as well as the forum. No answer found. Adobe has been no help at all.

How large is your catalog you're trying to restore? Mine is about 300GB (almost 50,000 photos). Does your restore take hours? Do you know about how long?

I've successfully restored the basic catalog without photos included. But then I obviously get no photos to show up, so that's not helpful.

Then I restored the catalog without the photos anyway and then thought I could copy all the photos from the old computer over to the new one and Photoshop would find them, but no luck there either. I had to do an import using the folder that the photos that I just copied over to the SSD and I was missing about 10,000 photos.

Report · May 30, 2024

Thanks for the reply buffrkhanso,

I am not trying to restore my catalog, just trying to create a full backup on an external drive. I went through the same process as you migrating all photos and videos from Windows to Mac back in 2023. I had a lot of problems but this community helped me through it and all is now working well except for this problem with backing up. I think if you do a search here for the threads I started you may find some help with your problems. As I recall the initial restore process did take several hours, maybe even overnight.

FYI here is the current info on my database:

Catalog Size: 305.50MB
Catalog Cache Size: 3.90GB

I have never counted all my photos and videos so I am not sure how many I actually have, I could not find a way to give me that total from within PSE.

-Ken

Report · May 30, 2024

Thanks for the added info Ken. I guess we're not doing exactly the same thing, but it could be close enough to be the same issue. I never thought it would take so many hours to do a backup and then even longer for a restore.

I'll search for your past posts and see if it might help me. Though, Adobe support is supposed to call me and get the error message I'm getting.

Your catalog is much smaller than mine - by a lot.

You can see the number of photos when you're looking at the grid - all photos. In the lower left corner, there's a count of photos.