Photoshop Elements 14 freezes during backup

[Joams]

Hi - I am having difficulty getting PSE 14 to backup. I had a system crash a couple years back and have spent a lot of time rebuilding my catalog. But I consistently can't get it to back up. There are files that won't reconnect, but I can bypass that problem and it begins to build the backup. Then it just hangs. Overnight. And in the morning it has not progressed past 46%, more or less. 

There is a little spinning wheel at the bottom left of the screen most of the time and it affects the performance in general and I have wondered if this is problematic with backup as well. I thought it might be some of the analysis features and so disabled them in preferences. Still spinning...

The help tab shows that the software is up to date. 

Can anyone help me get backup to run successfully?  I have put so much work in to reorganizing and really don't want to risk losing the catalog again!. 

[Greg_S.]

What OS are you using?

Have you tried Repairing and Optimizing the catalog  via the File>Manage Catalogs dialog?

Do you have plenty of free space on your system drive? 

Are you receiving any error messages?

How large is your catalog?  Are you backing up to an external drive?  The backup can take many, many hours, depending on the size of your catalog, and particularly if you have allowed face recognition since this creates a very small .json file for every photo in your catalog, and these take an enormous amount of time to copy and save to an external drive.  And the fact that you have a spinning wheel or that the Task Manager is showing the program as non-responsive may not be determinative.  Nor may the status bar be accurate.

[Joams]

Thanks for your reply. 

Windows 10 is my os.

I think the space is okay. 

I am backing up to an external hard drive.

I will repair and optimize again just to be sure.

I am not getting error messages. 

My catalog is huge. It is problematic that I have a bunch of duplicates (long story) but I really want to get this catalog backed up before I put more work into it...tidying, etc. 

My previous attempts at backing up my catalog did generate. json files. At some point I turned off face recognition because it bogged the program down so badly. Is there a way to deal with the .json file issue? Or get rid of them now that they are there? 

[Joams]

I did find out how to dispense with the .json files bo going into preferences and resetting the face data. So I guess I will just try again and be patient and see what happens!

[Joams]

Without the .json files, the backup completed in under 6 hours. That I can handle. Thanks so much!!!

[Greg_S.]

Glad you were able to fix your problem.  The .json files are individually small but there is one for each photo in your catalog.  A large number of these small files take far longer than one large file of the same size to copy.  That is why the backup was taking so long.

[Joams]

That makes sense. There were a lot of them. So I do have one last question on this.  If I manually organize my photos using the people tab, are the same files created? It would be handy to have them organized thus, but I already use keywords and that may be a better option.  

There are a few things that make me wonder if full Photoshop might be a better option, but that is likely a different question to pose under a different topic. But I do wonder if this funky, almost useless feature is unique to PSE and if it works better in more recent versions that 14 which I am using.

Thanks again, Greg! I am so happy to finally have a backup of my catalog!

[Greg_S.]

If I manually organize my photos using the people tab, are the same files created?

I believe the .json files are only created if you have face recognition analysis turned on.  So, if you only want to use keyword or even People tagging to manually tag the names of people in your images, that will work fine.  The people will be tagged, but if you go to the People room, you will not see thumbnails of the faces.  You will only see a generic icon.