How do I restore a Lightroom backup?
As we said in the last post, Lightroom’s integral backup simply takes a copy of your catalog and places it in dated subfolder, so restoring is a simple matter of opening that backup file.
However let’s exercise a little more caution… you wouldn’t want to risk damaging your last backup, so first, you’ll want to duplicate it and put it back in the right place.
Let’s assume your main catalog is stored at My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom 2 Catalog.lrcat, and your existing catalog has somehow become corrupted, or you’ve deleted photos accidentally.
By default your backups would be stored at My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom\Backups\dated folders\Lightroom 2 Catalog.lrcat.
First rename that main catalog, rather than deleting it, just in case you want to go back to it. We’ll call it ‘Old Catalog.lrcat’ for the moment.
Now go into your last dated backup folder and select the Lightroom 2 Catalog.lrcat file (or whatever your catalog is called). Copy it (Ctrl-C for Windows, Cmd-C for Mac) and go back to your main catalog folder where your catalog usually lives. Paste your copy of the backup catalog (Ctrl-V for Windows, Cmd-V for Mac) into that main catalog folder. Doing that copy/paste has left your backup catalog exactly where it was, but created a copy in the normal location.
Double click on that catalog to open in Lightroom. If it works correctly, you can now delete ‘Old Catalog.lrcat’, and carry on working.
I did all the above, and reopened the catalog in LR. The folders seem to be there, but the when I click on a photo, I get a reply that the photo is offline or missing. What am I doing wrong?
[That means that Lightroom doesn't know where to find the photo - someone's moved, renamed or deleted it using another program. You need to find that file (restoring from your own backups if necessary) and then click on the question mark in the corner of the thumbnail to point Lightroom back in the right direction. Don't forget that files are never 'in' Lightroom, and aren't included in the catalog backups. - VB]
Thanks!
Smart Bloggers are fantastic. Good Work.
Hello.
I have backed up my catalog which resides on an external hard drive. I have a brand new computer with no photos on it at all, all my photos are also backed up on the same external hard drive. I plan to hook up my external hard drive to the new computer which has LR already loaded. Could you please tell me the easiest way to move everything over (photos and catalog) so no links are broken? All my photos are in the folder “Photos”, do I simply copy this folder onto my new computer? Are any link going to be broken?
Thanks in advance for any help you can render!
[Perry, I can do better than that.... here's the whole thread on the subject of moving to a new computer: http://www.lightroomqueen.com/blog/2009/02/28/how-do-i-move-lightroom-to-a-new-computer/. - VB]
Superb and thank you so much!!!
I have copies the catalog and all original location picture folders to my laptop. Everything works fine, except the star rating are missing. Not a major problem… just womdering why this could happen. Any advice? Thanks in advance.
[That shouldn't be technically possible, as star ratings are stored in the catalog. Is all of the rest of the data, i.e. Develop settings showing ok? Could it simply be that you haven't got the star ratings showing the grid view? Perhaps check the View menu > View Options? - VB]
i have accidentally delete a subfolder in my LR catalog which contains hundreds of developed. rated, color labeled files. How may i recover this processed files? without start all over again the developing process? i have tried my latest backup ircat, but it did not up to the status/progress of all my developed files. please help!! thank you
[If you've just done it, Ctrl-Z/Cmd-Z may do the trick - or repeat until you get back to that stage. That'll work if you've not closed LR since though. I'm sorry to say, if you've removed the images from the catalog, and they weren't in the last backup, then we can reimport the files, but there's no way of bringing back the settings. Other thing to check, before you start processing them again, is whether you have 'automatically write to xmp' turned on in Preferences, in which case selecting the files in Grid view and going to Metadata menu > Read Metadata from Files should bring many of the settings back. - VB]
i delete the folder by pointing the folder & pressing control + left click ( Mac ), which pop up a “Remove” command
Having just accidentally deleted my photos, I panicked and tried to stop it from completing the task by hitting control-alt-delete. Unfortunately, lightroom had already deleted nearly half of my photos. I went to the recycling bin, and restored the pics to their original folders, but the edits are all gone. So I followed the instructions for restoring the backup, but the edits still haven’t come back. SOMEBODY READ THIS!!!! LIGHTROOM SHOULD GIVE YOU A BIG FLASHING WARNING WHEN YOU ARE ABOUT TO DELETE ALL OF YOUR PICTURES WITH EDITS!!! In the library module, when all of the pictures are selected, the light grey “selected” color is not different enough from the darker grey “unselected” color, and it’s easy to think you are about to delete only one picture, when in fact you are about to delete all of them. So in case this happens, there should be a CLEARER warning that has to be acknowledged before the delete command is executed. Currently, the warning is the same whether it is one photo or all your photos, the only difference being the plural form “photos” is used instead of “photo’. When you are in a routine of working with lightroom, it is easy to miss this warning. Something is needed to catch your attention and alert you to the fact that you are about to delete the whole catalogue, or a significant portion of it, including edits.
,[Sorry to hear you've had such a nightmare Shutterbug! I've just been back to double check exactly what the dialog says, and it reads "Delete the 200 selected master photos from disk, or just remove them from Lightroom? Delete moves the files to Finder’s Trash, removes them from Lightroom, and cannot be undone." and then it gives you a choice of Remove or Delete from Disk. I think flashing lights would be a bit distracting....
That said, do you have any catalog backups? Perhaps I can help you retrieve your settings for your other images? - VB]
i did import files to hope that the develop settings was back to normal & LR accidentally quit by it self after the deletion, i also did not have ‘automatically write to xmp’ turned on in Preferences..and read Metadata from Files did not bring many of the settings back. is there still any chances getting the developed settings back? thank you
Last night I thought I would check off another task from my to-do list, by emailing a couple of images to a new client. Opened Lightroom and saw that I hadn’t connected my external drive with the images. Plugged in the USB cable and Lightroom crashed. Tried restarting Lightroom, including a system reboot, and all I could get was error messages that the catalog was bad. The default repair didn’t work. Stupid me, that will teach me, but not all is lost – all I have to do is a restore of my backup catalog.
Well, the backup gave the same error messages. Now i’m in panic mode. Read all I could find online – seems I’m doing the restore correctly. Could there be another problem? Tried reinstalling Lightroom but that didn’t help. I’m not real sure I did a completely clean reinstall, since it didn’t ask for a serial number.
Worst case, I can erase anything to do with Lightroom, reinstall it, then re-import all the images from the last three years. I hope I don’t have to do that.
What are the best logical steps I should take to get back to a working Lightroom? Will Time Machine help any? What’s the best way to do a clean install? Can anyone repair a damaged catalog? Are there other files affected besides the .lrcat file?
[Jim, for a start, don't panic, I'm sure it's probably fixable. Drop by http://www.lightroomforums.net and post it there - it's far easier to chat by forum post, and we can run through the different options and what exactly the error messages say, and we should have you back up and running in no time. - VB]
Helloc
I would like to know if it would do any harm to store back ups on both the external hard drive and an exact copy in ‘my documents’ folder?
[No harm I can think of - more backups the better! - VB]
[...] the catalog was a case of shutting down Lightroom, and then copying the Lightroom 2 Catalog.lrcat file from the most recent backup on my NAS to [...]
HELP!
I am a very new user of LR but think it’s fantastic! Unfortunately though, I have spent a week importing, keywording and filing into Collections, a whole heap of images from a number of photographers setting up our image library in LR. Our designer then handed on an external harddrive which included additional and duplicate images from the same designers bar one. I imported these from the hard drive to LR on my laptop (wrong thing to do?) and all my previous Folders and Collections have disappeared.(AGH!)
I tried going through the steps above but can’t find Lightroom backups in My Documents. Have I set it up wrong? Is there any hope of retrieving the 700-odd images which have gone?
HELP
[Sounds very odd. Probably easier to chat on the forum than by blog comment. It may be something really simple and easy to fix. Drop by http://www.lightroomforums.net and we'll see if we can get you back on track. - VB]