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Catalogs Another Catalogue moving query.

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rockmen66

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Joined
Mar 15, 2018
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35
Location
Scotland
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
10.2
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.15 Catalina
I have Lightroom installed on my 1TB Fusion drive of my 2019 iMac. However I have kept my Catalogue, Photographs and Cache on a USB C connected Lacie SSD drive.

Now I am going to make a change to my system layout. I am going to set up the machine to boot from a Thunderbolt connected PCie SSD drive for performance reasons. I am going to do this using a backup from Time Machine.

So I want to move my Catalogue, Photographs and Cache back onto the boot drive. I believe there is a blank LR Catalog still on the original drive. Once the new drive is up and running would it be feasible to just open the original blank catalogue in LR and import my main catalogue off the Lacie drive. If this would work would it keep the original directory structure? The end result is to have all components of Lightroom residing on my new Thunderbolt SSD.

Or is there some other easier method?
 
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The worst thing that you can do is import into an empty catalog.
Is TimeMachine backing up the MacIntosh HD and the Lacie SSD drive (it should be)
If so you can simply restore the Lacie SSD drive folders to the new bootable volume.
If you have only a backup of the Primary (boot) drive, you can restore to the new Boot drove and then copy the Lightroom related folders to the new boot drive from the Lacie SSD drive. Your Master catalog is (if I understand correctly) on the Lacie SSD drive, you need to copy that folder to the new volume and start Lightroom with that copy of the catalog.
 
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Thanks for the info. I think I will go with the manual copying of the files. So I should just copy the lrcat, Helper, Preview files. Plus of course the folder structure containing my photographs to location on my new drive?

Then open this catalogue on the new drive?
 
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Just completed the move all went OK Many Thanks for your help.

One other thing. The external (Samsung X5) Thunderbolt drive is working really fast (about 2500MB/s). Should I keep the Lightroom cache/previews on this drive rather than the Lacie USB C (450MB/s). My guess would be the fastest drive on the machine.
 
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