OneDrive & LR Cat problem

[Brimar]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom Classic v9

Operating System

1. Windows 10

I went to open LR Classic v9 this evening and a message came up to say that the catalog could not be found. Somehow or other my LR Catalog has moved from the default folder to Onedrive. The C/Users/Brian/Pictures/Lightroom folder is no longer there. I can open LR by clicking on an older catalog file in the OneDrive location but I am reluctant to click on the latest catalog as it is only half the size of the older catalog and is shown as ‘sync pending’.

The cause of the trouble has to be my lack of understanding of how OneDrive works. I have recently been fiddling with it and set it to back up my C: drive Documents and Pictures folders, totalling forgetting the LR cat files were in there, but for whatever reason it has stripped out these folders completely and moved everything onto OneDrive, leaving nothing behind. I thought OneDrive would just copy the contents of a folder and copy it to the cloud.

I tried to copy the LR catalog files back to the C: drive but the copying process stops with the message ‘There is not enough space on Pictures. You need an additional 4.64GB to copy these files’. I even tried to copy the files onto other attached hard drives but get the same message. Any suggestions please?

 

[Victoria Bampton]

I haven't spent much time with OneDrive, but it seems to have an "on-demand" mode that frees up local disk space by storing files and only downloading them when they're needed. If that's enabled, you'd want to set Lightroom's files to always keep locally, or move them out of OneDrive.

 

[Brimar]

Many thanks! That solved the problem. I waited until OneDrive had synced, unticked 'Files on Demand' in OneDrive settings and copied the LR catalog files from OneDrive and pasted them back into my local 'Pictures' folder. I will keep the main LR catalog file local but let OneDrive sync a copy to the cloud as a form of backup. Thanks again for your help.