Can the LR catalog get corrupted without obvious signs of it?

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svenh

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I run my own backup system that backups my photos as well as the LR catalog and I have thought quite a bit about this to end up with a workflow that seems the most practical for me. For the LR catalog, this involves copying it to two other HDD:s after each session. Once a month, the catalog is copied to an external HDD stored outside of my house.

Reading about corrupted LR catalogs however raised a few questions:
* Is it common that the LR catalog gets corrupted? what can cause the catalog to get corrupted?
* If it gets corrupted, wouldn't this likely show immediately in terms of odd behavior of LR?
* Is it possible to do some kind of integrity check after each LR session, before backing up the catalog to another HDD?

Warm regards,
Sven
 
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Corruption's not actually that common - it just appears that way because people only appear on the forums when things go wrong, and not when it's all working perfectly. But it's a database, and it can happen, so it's worth having backups.

A few things can cause Lightroom to become corrupted. Most common is proper corruption, usually from power outage, kernal panics, proper hardware issues. It can also happen when the working catalog is on an external drive, because the drive connection drops intermittently (unofficially most often USB on Mac), or because the drive gets unplugged while Lightroom's open. Those occasions, the integrity check should recognise.

There are odd occasions when the database gets 'mixed up', where the integrity check passes ok because it's a valid database, but there's some mystery data messing things up, and those cause weird behaviour rather than corrupted error messages, but you wouldn't necessarily spot it immediately. Those are usually fixed by using import from catalog to transfer data to a fresh catalog a chunk at a time, as it's usually confined to one bit of the catalog. Again, backups help.

In terms of your backup strategy, it sounds logical. I'd be inclined to still let LR run it's backups from time to time, or keep versioned backups yourself, even just every few weeks, depending on how much work you do in that time frame, as then you're more likely to have a 'good' copy. Zip them up, if you're concerned about disc space. It'll probably never be an issue, but you'd really kick yourself if it was.
 
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Thanks for your insight Victoria!

Yes, I have decided to let LR make catalog backups once a week for some time to see how I like it, how much HDD space needed etc.
 
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Zip the backup files - saves around 9'% of the file space.

John
 
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Although I was told that zipping a corrupted catalog can corrupt it beyond repair...
 
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Thanks, I went back and checked the wording - "a zipped up database goes from being mostly recoverable if bits in it get corrupted, to more easily corruptable. (one bit goes, the whole file goes.)" So it's not that zipping a corrupted database will corrupt it further, but that a zipped database becoming corrupted hoses the database beyond repair. Interesting.
 
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An interesting education for me too! I love learning stuff like that!
 
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