Corrupted catalog. Can anyone help fixing it?

[Pete Hendley]

Hi,
I migrated to a new computer because my hard drive died. I had backed up the catalog a couple days before on an external hard drive. Unfortunately, I have just that one backup. When I try to open it in Lightroom 5.7, I can see all the data there but when I try to back it up it says there is an error and upon re-opening tries to fix it and can't. After that it won't open. With a fresh copy of that one back up file it will open again but with the same result.

Is there any way I can fix this or find someone who can fix this? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
And Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Pete

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Hi Pete, welcome to the forum!

Sorry to hear it's a disaster that's brought you here. Zip up the catalog - just the lrcat bit - and use www.wetransfer.com to send it to me at [email protected] and I'll take a look.

 

[Pete Hendley]

Thank you for your reply. I'm glad to report that I used some data recovery software to find my catalog backups made just prior to the corrupted one, and was able to upload one of them successfully just yesterday. Thank goodness. I remembered that I had once had the backups on this particular external drive though they had been deleted for other reasons. So this data recovery software (Easeus) was able to dig them out of the ether. I was very surprised. Perhaps this can help someone else.

I'm glad to have found the site and no doubt have much to learn.

Thanks again for responding so promptly,
Pete

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Oh that's good news Pete.