Lost my Lightroom 2 catalog

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daemon

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ARGHHHG...I was working in Lightroom this morning on a couple of photo's, closed it and quickly wanted to export photo's now to mail to a friend, Lightroom opens but I cannot see any of my collections, or photo's, close lightroom, reboot and now it says it cannot open my catalog. Copied my 4 day old backup of the catalog to the lightroom directory, photo's are back, but I lost alot of lightroom imports and changes I made to virtual copies to photo's.......ARGHHH...I love Lightroom 2 and it took me a whilte to swap from Bridge to LR2, but jeez lost alot of faith in it now. Imagine your a wedding photographer and you lost all your changes...I make a backup a week, even if I make a backup of my catelog once a day I would still have lost alot of changes...
Anything like this happened to anyone else?
 
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Welcome aboard Daemon.
Sorry you had an issue with a catalog.
First can you fill in your signature (in the userCP - top left of the page) so we can better assist you - thanks.
Now step through what happened and tell us how large the "faulty" catalog is please.
 
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Created virtual copies of three photo's this morning, moved the virtual copies to a collection I have for these type of photo's, worked a little on the virtual copies. Closed lightroom, went out, came back to export the photo's and mail it to a friend. Opened up lightroom and I see no images AT ALL, a couple of grey boxes, and the menu on the left side with my imported folders shows the number of photo's in them but I cannot see them, open and close lightroom a couple of times, no difference, decide to reboot. Open lightroom I get a error saying lightroom cannot open my catelog, do I want to open another one...use explorer check the catalog file out, size it zero, copied my backup catelog over and now my photo's are back, but the last coupleof days work is gone. Catelog size is 51meg.
 
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daemon said:
Created virtual copies of three photo's this morning, moved the virtual copies to a collection I have for these type of photo's, worked a little on the virtual copies. Closed lightroom, went out, came back to export the photo's and mail it to a friend. Opened up lightroom and I see no images AT ALL, a couple of grey boxes, and the menu on the left side with my imported folders shows the number of photo's in them but I cannot see them, open and close lightroom a couple of times, no difference, decide to reboot. Open lightroom I get a error saying lightroom cannot open my catelog, do I want to open another one...use explorer check the catalog file out, size it zero, copied my backup catelog over and now my photo's are back, but the last coupleof days work is gone. Catelog size is 51meg.
Click to expand...

Werner, when you look in open recent can you see the "old" catalog? If you can please try and open it from that menu. Thanks.

I am off to bed soon though!! 11 pm here !!:shock:
 
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Thanks...but it's not working.
What worries me is that the "old" catalog is ' KB in size

Seems my changes are gone....

Anything I can do to prevent this from happening again, apart from the now, once a day catalog backups.
 
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daemon said:
Thanks...but it's not working.
What worries me is that the "old" catalog is ' KB in size

Seems my changes are gone....

Anything I can do to prevent this from happening again, apart from the now, once a day catalog backups.
Click to expand...

That seems very unusual. Will need to think about this some more, so will look again in the am although I am sure one of the other gurus will chip in with an opinion before then.
Can't think of anything else you can do, well maybe you could buy a Mac!!:lol:

Or a rugby team !!
 
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I've never heard of that one either. I don't suppose there's another catalog in a different location, that you could be looking at the wrong one? Or possibly look at your own backups to see if you have something more recent? The only time I've heard of something similar, it turned out that the user's file sync software had overwritten the catalog.
 
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Try a search on your HD for .lrcat. you may find your other catalog stuck off somewhere.

Don
 
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The symptom of grey boxes in Grid seems to be popping up with more regularity. I seem to remember that happening back in the day, but can't remember why -- video driver updates needed or something, maybe? What's the usual trigger for that symptom?
 
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Kiwigeoff said:
That seems very unusual. Will need to think about this some more, so will look again in the am although I am sure one of the other gurus will chip in with an opinion before then.
Can't think of anything else you can do, well maybe you could buy a Mac!!:lol:

Or a rugby team !!
Click to expand...

Actually I have a mac :) but running LR on PC for now, need to swap it over, time machine would have saved me!
 
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daemon said:
Actually I have a mac :) but running LR on PC for now, need to swap it over, time machine would have saved me!
Click to expand...

DON'T HAVE TIME MACHINE RUNNING WITH LR RUNNING!!!
It can cause major catalog corruption......:shock::shock::shock::evil:
 
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Kiwigeoff;2359' said:
DON'T HAVE TIME MACHINE RUNNING WITH LR RUNNING!!!
It can cause major catalog corruption......:shock::shock::shock::evil:
Click to expand...

Ahhh dammm! Guess it's time capsule for me then.
 
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Erm, Time Capsule won't help on this one either Werner, because as far as I know, it uses the same software. You can have Time Machine running, but the issue is that you excluse Lightroom's catalog. If Time Machine tries to back up Lightroom's catalog while it's running, corruption can result. Set Lightroom's own backups to back up regularly (i.e. daily) to another drive, and you should be set.
 
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daemon said:
Actually I have a mac :) but running LR on PC for now, need to swap it over, time machine would have saved me!
Click to expand...

What is Tiny XP? I don't recall seeing that as an operating system Lightroom supports. There may be parts of XP missing that Lightroom needs.
 
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Victoria Bampton said:
Erm, Time Capsule won't help on this one either Werner, because as far as I know, it uses the same software. You can have Time Machine running, but the issue is that you excluse Lightroom's catalog. If Time Machine tries to back up Lightroom's catalog while it's running, corruption can result. Set Lightroom's own backups to back up regularly (i.e. daily) to another drive, and you should be set.
Click to expand...
We need an illustrated "Tip & Trick" on "how to set Time Machine with Lightroom" then... :idea:

Just knowing that the active .lrcat should be excluded do not tell how to do it. I am new to Mac since I buyed my MacPro last may and I didn't fired Time Machine yet just by lack of information on this particular detail. :|
 
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I'll add it to my to-do list Denis, unless someone else gets there first.
 
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Well, that gave me a bit of a turn! I didn't realise I shouldn't be running Time Machine while working in LR (I'm new to the Mac world).

I have now gone into Time Machine preferences and excluded my catalogue file (go into the preferences and click on "Options"), then went into catalogue preferences in LR and changed the location of the backup file to the same external disk that I use for Time Machine. The way I did this was to set the timing of the backup to "next time only", then restarted it so I was presented with the backup dialog, then changed the backup directory. After that I went back into catalogue preferences and set the backup time to once a day. Isn't there an easier way of doing this?

I have now set LR to back up once a day on starting LR. I must say I find this a bit illogical. Wouldn't it be better to back up on closing LR? Since I don't use LR daily that can leave quite a gap before the changed files are backed up.

Martin
 
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mreddington said:
Well, that gave me a bit of a turn! I didn't realise I shouldn't be running Time Machine while working in LR (I'm new to the Mac world).

I have now gone into Time Machine preferences and excluded my catalogue file (go into the preferences and click on "Options"), then went into catalogue preferences in LR and changed the location of the backup file to the same external disk that I use for Time Machine. The way I did this was to set the timing of the backup to "next time only", then restarted it so I was presented with the backup dialog, then changed the backup directory. After that I went back into catalogue preferences and set the backup time to once a day. Isn't there an easier way of doing this?

I have now set LR to back up once a day on starting LR. I must say I find this a bit illogical. Wouldn't it be better to back up on closing LR? Since I don't use LR daily that can leave quite a gap before the changed files are backed up.

Martin
Click to expand...

File it as a feature request Martin
 
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How do run SyncToy? Scheduled, or do you start it by hand?

I've been running it for a couple of years, with an autorun around 2am, and never encountered a problem. I guess you could encounter a problem if you were actually working in LR as the SyncToy was running.
 
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