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Corrupt Catalog with no backup

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mcdunstan

New Member
Joined
Nov 29, 2014
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Flagstaff, AZ
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Good afternoon,

My business partner and I share various external hard drives and yesterday before I could shut down a LR catalog, she unplugged it and now when I try to open the LR catalog, it says it's corrupt and cannot open the file. I don't have a backup. :(

I've searched online and came across this site. Is there anyone out there that has any insight on how I could get my catalog back?

I use LR 5.7, PC, Windows 7.

Thank you,
Melissa
 
Welcome to the forum. Sorry to hear about your catalog problem. Is there a catalog.lrcat.lock file in your directory? If so, try moving the file to the trash and see if the program will now open the catalog. I suspect your problem may be a bit more challenging, but let's rule this out as it is simple. If it does not work, restore the file from the trash can.

Good luck,

--Ken
 
Thank you Ken, this is a great forum, thank you for being so welcoming. I don't see a lock file in the directory. Thank you for suggesting that though, I appreciate any help I can get right now :)
 
A long shot....create a new catalog then try importing the problem catalog. Let me know if that works, but if not Victoria has a contact at Adobe who can often repair corrupted catalogs. I'll ping her and ask her to drop by to give you the contact details for sending the catalog.
 
I've asked Victoria to drop by with her email address for sending catalogs to.

Edit: though Victoria tells me you've already hooked up and the catalog is already en route to her Adobe contact. So fingers crossed.

In the meantime, how about a quiet (or maybe not so quiet, lol) word with your business partner to the effect that she should never, ever, under any circumstances, pull the plug on an external drive until she has successfully ejected it using the dedicated OS eject utility?
 
Well I have landed here with nearly the same problem except I back up regularly. My LR crashed in GRID view and when I signed out and tried to back up in fear of something really wrong, when I started LR again 1. it said the catalog was corrupt. so I used the last backup but none of the images appear as if the images will not render. So if anyone has any ideas it would be great...Also I have lost 1 week of edits so if I can somehow restore this Lrcat file it would be great....which of course I can't find in that folder all of a sudden.
A long shot....create a new catalog then try importing the problem catalog. Let me know if that works, but if not Victoria has a contact at Adobe who can often repair corrupted catalogs. I'll ping her and ask her to drop by to give you the contact details for sending the catalog.
 
Hi Jim,

I'm in a very similar situation as mcdunstan, except that I formatted my fiancés hard drive and am the one responsible for writing over her .lrcat file. (I thought there were backups.) Needless to say, I feel incredibly bad and I'm desperately trying to get her hours of work back. I was able to run a recovery program Disk Drill, and recovered the file. It now appears to be quite corrupt, and I've been working on ways to open it over the last few days, but to no avail. I truly believe my last option is to have an expert look over the file and see if it's actually possible to salvage. If there's a way to send this .lrcat file on to Victoria, I would be forever grateful.

Thank you!
David
 
Hi David. Yes, feel free. Zip it up, use www.wetransfer.com to send it to [email protected] and I'll forward it to my magician at Adobe. They're closed for a couple of weeks, so there will be a bit of a delay unless I can get it working. To be honest, I'm not too hopeful because of the file recovery software, but it's worth a shot.
 
Hi Victoria - Do you still have that connection to the Adobe magician? I'm in a desperate situation with my master catalog.
 
Hi Robert, yes, follow the instructions above to send it on over.
 
Hi Victoria, My computer went blue screen and now my catalog is corrupt and won't repair, I unfortunately didn't have a back up yet after 7 solid hours of work :(
I tried all of the above. No .lock file and won't import the catalog in from a new one. Any other ideas?
Is it possible to also get your Adobe magician to have a look at it?
 
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Hi Lindy. Yes, no problem, follow the instructions above.
 
I'm sure the ones here will do so from now on, but also tell anyone else you know.. To backup, backup, backup!

As far as LR catalog backups go, I have LR set to backup at EVERY single exit - and will periodically make a point to exit after any amount of work I would rather not lose, just so it can backup. In addition, these backups are put directly into a [free] Google Drive folder to sync up to the cloud - and as well, periodically backed up with Cobian Backup to another local drive (actually, an old low-speed NTFS-formatted (for better resiliency) 16GB SD card that's always left in the built-in card slot). However, If no changes were done, I'll select 'skip for now' in the dialog.

To make this easier, I've installed a script to restart LR automatically. I've also found that frequent restarts can help significantly with the speed of LR, to boot. The script and instructions can be found here: Even Lightroom Needs a Power Nap Every Now and Then
 
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Victoria I need some HELP! I hope this is still an active thread...
I'm running LR5 and have a bad catalog file and I have no clue on how to recover without a backup. I've been reading about random fixes and nothing is working.

Any insight and guidance is appreciated.
Peace
 
Send it on over and we'll give it a shot Joe. And make some backups!!
 
Got it... but I'm afraid that looks dead as a dodo.
 
Thanks for the help and crazy quick response.
Any other tips or tricks... other that reimport 40k images ?
 
That's as good as it gets I'm afraid. Maybe hunt through your external drives and see if you can find older backups. Something might be better than nothing.
 
Hi Victoria,

I have the same problem with my LR but I do not have any backup. Please help me out.

Best,
Heidi
 
Hi Victoria!

I was wondering if I too could send you my lightroom catalog? I recently had an external hard drive crash, but I was able to recover all the files through a data recovery service. Unfortunately, I’m still not able to open my lightroom catalog and I get the message that it is corrupt and the built-in repair does not work. I’ve tried multiple things but nothing seems to be working. Could you help me out?

Thanks!
 
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