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Catalogs lrcat-wal file backed up (but why?).

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McPhil

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Jan 9, 2013
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30
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Massachusetts
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Intermediate
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic version 10.3
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  1. macOS 10.15 Catalina
Dear forum members,
I just backed up my catalog and it backed up the lrcat file (5.1 GB) okay. But it also backed up the lrcat-wal file (5.13 GB). This has happened before but doesn't happen consistently. Why would this happen and is there a way to prevent LR Classic from backing up the lrcat-wal file? Thank you for you help.
 
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The wal file is the write ahead log, part of the database operations.

I set my backup to only backup *.lrcat, which does it. Depends on your backup software, I guess. I do it that way as I don't want all the Previews files backed up.
 
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McPhil said:
Dear forum members,
I just backed up my catalog and it backed up the lrcat file (5.1 GB) okay. But it also backed up the lrcat-wal file (5.13 GB). This has happened before but doesn't happen consistently. Why would this happen and is there a way to prevent LR Classic from backing up the lrcat-wal file? Thank you for you help.
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Lightroom by itself backs up only the catalog file itself and in a ZIP file.

Some other backup routine (Time Machine ??) is backing up changed files. IF you have Lightroom active when this backup runs, then the wal file exists. Shut down LR, and this file disappears.
 
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Paul McFarlane said:
The wal file is the write ahead log, part of the database operations.

I set my backup to only backup *.lrcat, which does it. Depends on your backup software, I guess. I do it that way as I don't want all the Previews files backed up.
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Paul, thank you for your reply. Much appreciated. I will double check that my backup setting is for *.lrcat only.
 
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McPhil said:
Paul, thank you for your reply. Much appreciated. I will double check that my backup setting is for *.lrcat only.
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What do you use for backup? From your initial post I got the impression that you use the built-in catalog backup from Lightroom Classic itself. If so, don't bother looking for a setting not to backup the .lrcat-wal file. There is no such setting. Lightroom Classic should only backup the .lrcat file, and in fact there shouldn't be a .lrcat-wal file once Lightroom Classic has quit. On a normal quit, this file will be deleted because it is no longer needed.
 
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PhilBurton said:
Lightroom by itself backs up only the catalog file itself and in a ZIP file.

Some other backup routine (Time Machine ??) is backing up changed files. IF you have Lightroom active when this backup runs, then the wal file exists. Shut down LR, and this file disappears.
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Phil, thank you for your reply. Whenever I backup Lightroom it is via the Lightroom Quit dialogue. The backup that I made recently that included the lrcat-wal file was not zipped, so something is amiss. I will check my Time Machine settings to ascertain if that is the culprit.
 
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Johan Elzenga said:
What do you use for backup? From your initial post I got the impression that you use the built-in catalog backup from Lightroom Classic itself. If so, don't bother looking for a setting not to backup the .lrcat-wal file. There is no such setting. Lightroom Classic should only backup the .lrcat file, and in fact there shouldn't be a .lrcat-wal file once Lightroom Classic has quit. On a normal quit, this file will be deleted because it is no longer needed.
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Greetings Johan, indeed I do use the built-in catalog backup when quitting LR Classic. I am puzzled when the resulting backup includes the lrcat-wal file along with the lrcat backup. Neither file was zipped either. This behavior happens sporadically. I have older lrcat backups that were zipped properly without that lrcat-wal file.
 
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McPhil said:
Greetings Johan, indeed I do use the built-in catalog backup when quitting LR Classic. I am puzzled when the resulting backup includes the lrcat-wal file along with the lrcat backup. Neither file was zipped either. This behavior happens sporadically. I have older lrcat backups that were zipped properly without that lrcat-wal file.
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I have never heard of a situation where LrC backs up the lrcat-wal file, and the fact that the backup wasn’t zipped either suggests to me that it was not LrC which created this backup, or that the backup process got interrupted improperly.
 
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McPhil said:
Greetings Johan, indeed I do use the built-in catalog backup when quitting LR Classic. I am puzzled when the resulting backup includes the lrcat-wal file along with the lrcat backup. Neither file was zipped either. This behavior happens sporadically. I have older lrcat backups that were zipped properly without that lrcat-wal file.
Click to expand...
Lightroom Classic's backup routine only creates a zipped backup file of the catalog in the date named folder. You can unzip the file and the unzipped catalog backup up file will be placed in the date named back up folder. If you open this catalog file at this location Lightroom Classic will create a Write Ahead Log file and some other helper files while this catalog file is open. AFAIK, this is the only way that the .wal file can appear here. This is probably what happened to create the *.wal file. It is not a backup of any other *.wal file.
 
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clee01l said:
Lightroom Classic's backup routine only creates a zipped backup file of the catalog in the date named folder. You can unzip the file and the unzipped catalog backup up file will be placed in the date named back up folder. If you open this catalog file at this location Lightroom Classic will create a Write Ahead Log file and some other helper files while this catalog file is open. AFAIK, this is the only way that the .wal file can appear here. This is probably what happened to create the *.wal file. It is not a backup of any other *.wal file.
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Yes, that could also explain it, except that you would also expect to see a “catalog previews.lrdata” file and a Helper file in that case. If I understand the OP correctly, he only sees the catalog file and the wal file, however.
 
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Johan Elzenga said:
Yes, that could also explain it, except that you would also expect to see a “catalog previews.lrdata” file and a Helper file in that case. If I understand the OP correctly, he only sees the catalog file and the wal file, however.
Click to expand...

Unless your OP deleted these. But I agree there is no way to get a catalog file and a *.wal file in a backup folder using Lightroom’s backup


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
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Thank you one and all for your replies to my query. I will study the backup problem I have and try to discover what is going haywire.
 
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