And I listened to you back in 2018 and saved it to my YT library. This week when LR stopped working with lots of scary error messages. I went to my backup and 15 minutes later I was back up and running. Didn't miss a beat. Thank you for this video. Made my day!
Thank you sooooooo much. I've been searching for a video for the longest time that tells me what to do in a case like this, and they were just beating around the bushes. You answered each and every one of my questions. I appreciate this!
My other advice (and Scott Kelby has said in some of his LR videos that he does this) is DO NOT store your catalog file (LRCAT) in the cloud and share it between machines. This can lead to problems. Just don't do it. If you need to have a portable workflow, there is a way to store your catalog on an external drive, and map your hard drives in a way that LR will look for the external SSD or HDD and you can quickly (and effortlessly) move between multiple computers with a single catalog. It does decrease LR's performance a tad, but not by much that I can see (on an external SSD drive; so the benefit of having a "portable" catalog on an external SSD that I can plug into any one of my 3 computers at any time, greatly outweighs the slight performance hit you take). The big key point though is that all computers that will access the catalog must be the same version and release/build, to avoid corruption of your catalog.
Good points Terry. I have always used a Time Machine thinking all was safe. Around twice a year I do a LR initiated backup too. I have only had one small problem that was corrected by doing a backup. With this video it reminded to check. No problems found but I'll be sure to do this more often. Also while cleaning out backups I noticed that when loading a different catalogue, you have the check Integrity button.
Great tip Terry! I have a recurring reminder with the link to my backup folder in my Outlook calendar set for every 3 months to clean out the older backups.
Thanks. Now that you are backing up, perhaps you could influence Adobe to add a feature that will allow us to automatically delete past backup catalogs so they would not keep eating up more and more disk space. A feature that would allow us to specify how many previous backups to keep.
Terry, fantastic video, direct and to the point. Beautifully videoed, great sound and picture quality, easy to understand. On the basis of the quality of this video I have subscribed to your RU-vid Channel. Thanks!
One tip if you do have to restore or repair a catalog... when LR does finally open with the repaired catalog, I would export all edits to XMP files and backup the XMP files. This way if the catalog does get corrupt again, you can re-create the catalog again and allow LR to read the XMP files (and thus import your edits, keywords, etc). Not everything is stored in XMP files (like your collections obviously, or things like pick flags, but your edits and keywords are, and I would think those would be the most important data to backup -- you can re-create collections and redo pick flags pretty quickly, but re-doing edits may be more difficult). So I would seriously consider doing this, and either turning on the XMP Files option in the Catalog Options so that LR automatically writes all changes to XMP files as well as the LR Catalog, or force LR to write the XMP files on a periodic basis (by selecting all images and telling LR to write data to XMP files manually. The XMP files option is what many pro shooters consider to be a secondary backup and the option you SHOULD turn on (even though everyone says to turn it off for performance reasons -- as there can be a slightly performance hit if you enable the option, but IMO the benefits greatly outweigh the speed hit). (XMP files were intended so that edits made in LR can be read in PS and ACR, but you can also use them as a means to automatically / periodically backup your edits from LR too.)
Thanks Terry, I backup every time LR quits but I do clean the list up regularly, I also keep a separate secondary LR backup folder on an external HD, the primary is on a second HD in my main PC. I did this because with a 256GB SSD as my OS drive that started to function really slowly and I found a huge LR folder because the Previews and Smart Previews folder went to the primary drive - so that needs archiving or deleting periodically.
Terry, fortunately I have had the correct backup settings since I started using LR, and have never had any issue as you described. That being said, I was not aware of the error message that occurs in the event files became corrupted. That piece of info helps so I don't panic in the event it did occur. Great reference. Thank you. By the way, I do run system checks on my computer weekly (defrags, etc), and you can delete corrupted files by entering → %temp%, enter, and your file system will display all of the corrupted files which you can delete by Ctrl A, then delete. Just something I picked up.
Just as an FYI I think they have changed this so it's now set to once per week or something because people weren't backing up their catalogs. Either way, I have mine set for every time I quit LR. If I don't feel like waiting for a backup, or if I don't really make any edits (that cannot be redone later should I have a corrupt catalog) then I just tell it to skip the backup. But I would recommend people set this to Every Time you leave, because sometimes you may spend hours in LR, and the last thing you want to do is lose your work. If you're in a rush, then you can skip the backup but at least it prompts you each time you exit. SEcond is to test your backup catalog at least once per week or month, depending on usage. I simply rename my catalog file (LRCAT fiile) and go back in and restore the most recent backup, relaunch LR and make sure my edits are there. I might even have it just go through and verify all the files exist and might even go as far as to export a few images to make sure nothing is wrong. I do wish LR had a built-in menu item that you could verify the integrity of the catalog and database on demand (ie. when you want to). I also have periodically had it export all edits to XMP files so I have a backup in case the LR catalog does crash--I don't necesarily lose all my edits.
Whenever Lightroom says it needs to repair the catalog, after the repair it is advisable to do a resync of the photos you have in all the folders in the repaired catalog. If the resync results in missing photos and a reimport, those photos will be fresh and you may need to reapply whatever edits, metadata you had added previously.
You shouldn't need to resync anything just because you repaired you catalog. If you do have to replace images with fresh copies then yes you'll need to reapply the edits to them as well.
WOW very surprised to hear a Lr Guru/Yoda/Master such as yourself Terry would have this happen to you. Always "Practice What You Teach" definitely applies here. Thanks great info. I always test integrity
Thank you terry 🌹🌹but how to use or create catalog out of my laptop ? I don’t want to keep my photo on my laptops I wish my photo and catalog on time capsule to keep my laptop free space
So I watch all the way thru thinking great now I will learn where and how too delete from my backup catalogs since LR puts in two different descriptions and I don't know what to save unfortunately the extra 30 seconds required to do that sequence properly was skipped.
Hi Terry.. Thank you for your great Tutorials. I have one question, do you have or will you have a tutorial covering how to copy photos from one Catalogue to another? Thanks Art
I had a corrupted Lightroom catalog that Lightroom could not repair. And, at that time, as a habit, I did not make a dedicated catalog backup with integrity testing. I had to send the corrupted catalog to Adobe and to my everlasting relief, they were able to repair it and recover everything...….. I now make a separate, integrity tested catalog backup every time Lightroom closes...…. I sleep much better now...…...
interesting video Terry .. I was thinking of using a 2TB HD for my backup , i also use backblaze for my whole drives and computer of my pc .. personally every week .. ??? it depends , i'm still trying to move my LR5.7 Catalogs to my LR Classic .. any help with this ?
You must not store the 'Lrcat on the C drive, back it up onto a seperate drive. I then back up with a copy of this file onto a 2rd drive. also save files with XMPs
Thanks. Just one question, should I save the LR catalog in the SSD drive or regular HD? Will it make a different where the catalog is saved in a fast SSD?
Good lesson. Thanks. Now do one on RECOVERING a backup. My Lightroom catalog crashed right after the last update. I tried to recover with the last weeks backup made with the integrity box checked as this video showed. When unzipped, Lightroom gave me an error. What’s the proper restore method? (I finally found a valid backup from about 4 months earlier. Recovery took a while, but most of my edits were in xmp sidecars-thankfully!)
Can you update this to the current Lightroom Classic settings - I do not see the same drop downs that you showed in July 2018 such as just this one time, I do not see a test the integrity on the lastest version updated today. Thanks Terry
Lightroom catalog is some version of SQL (e.g. MySQL, who knows). I can tell you from years as a soft dev that when a relational database gets corrupted you are screwed big time! Also just as important is the optimization step so huge indexes etc. get coalesced. Great video though!
I have a huge issue with my catalog. All my collections are mixed up. when I send someone a share link for their collection, pictures from other collections show in there. I don't know how to fix that. any recommendations?
Hi Terry, I have had this problem and my Catalog as not repaired itself !!! how do i get to a previous backup to reinstall a previous backup ??? It did not tell me that there was a problem backing up until I tried to reopen Lightroom, any ideas please would be greatly appreciated as i have just photographed my nieces wedding and they were coming to look at the photos tomorrow !!! HELP
Problem with my LR catalog.Running a sync folder and when I returned, there were no pictures in the catalog. Pictures were obviously left on the disk.Tried to restart with the backup copy of the catalog that was zipped, thar did nor worked of course. Used a program recommended on the problem description at Abebe suport site, 72X, how to do with the zipped catalog.After much work with this, all my presets have disappeared.How to locate and restore the presets.Thank you for all the advice.Sincerely
Thanks for the video, very helpful. However, what are my options if the repair of the catalog failed? I can still go open the catalog in Lightroom CC Classic but integrity check failed all the time.
Hi Terry, or anyone viewing this video. Does anyone know an answer to my particular problem? Yesterday when I exited LRC it said it couldn't back up my catalogue to the normal location and there was an option to try another location. I then set up a back up folder on an external HDD and told LRC to back up to there, but still, it came back with this message `unable to back up to this location`. So I set up a back up folder on a 3rd HDD and told LRC to back up there but again got this message `unable to back up to this location`. I Googled for answers to this problem and searched YT and so far haven't found any answer. In the end yesterday I exited without backing up and then later on in the day logged back in to LRC and this time it let me back up to my normal location! This morning 10/4/21 I've logged into LRC done some work, but again when I came to log out it again came up with this message about `not being able to back up to this location`. Has anyone else experienced this problem and if so how did you fix it? Thanks everyone?
Hello Terry! Thank you this tutorial, it really helped me. When we previously backed up we two files, one was locate and the other one was lrdat. Are these two files all combined as one in the zip file? Thank you for answering.
i dont mean to be off topic but does anyone know of a trick to get back into an instagram account?? I stupidly lost my password. I love any help you can offer me.
@Tristen Bryce I really appreciate your reply. I found the site on google and I'm in the hacking process atm. Takes quite some time so I will reply here later with my results.
Thanks for the vid. I was already dong this. What does LR Back up do when it optimizes the catalog? anyone? The reason I ask is I have found folders moved in a different order. After a while I had to go in & re-organize my folders. Note, I'm using LR6.14.
Backup your catalog is fine but it is only half the work. We are now in 2019 and Adobe still not let you back-up your images. So that sucks. I still have to do it manual. When will Adobe have a feature that back-up you real images and only the images that you not have back-up yet? The other programs are worse but lightroom is for me the best of all the worsed programs. Not all people have a mac with timemachine. There are PC users als well. Not everyone will back up there 4 TB or more to the cloud. Maybe the up-load speed is to low or it is to costly to get big files to the cloud. So my alternative is a external HD but I always back-up the whole catalog and it takes forever. So I do it about 4 times a year. Why does ASdobe not make a feature that backup only the new files with all the edits? When you want it to a location you want.
Bad Adobe!!! Why isn't there just an option to test the integrity of the catalog when I open it in the settings? This seems way too much to go thru just to test the integrity, most of us have developed a back-up workflow for years. Sorry Adobe but you guys are dropping the ball with LR.
