Please Help Me Avert Disaster!

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KED

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I have all my photos (13,''' +) in one catalog. It's never been a problem, and I back up obsessively. Yesterday, while working on my most recent photos, my Mac acted up and I had to shut down. Once I was able to re-start, and had the hardware problem under control, LR told me that my catalog was corrupted, and the proffered "attempt to repair" did not work. I've searched here and elsewhere for advice on how to restore a catalog from a backup, but I always seem to end up at the Adobe site which only addresses 1.1; I'm at 2.x. Can someone point me -- PLEASE -- to a step by step recipe for what to grab from backups in order to recreate my original catalog???? I can go back one week via Time Machine for a clean .lrcat and .lrdata file; my LR backup (automatic on startup) just backed up the corrupt catalog.
 
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Take the "bad" catalog out of the Lightroom folder. Place the last good backup .lrcat in the Lightroom folder. Double-click the .lrcat file to open it in Lightroom.
 
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Kent, how often do you have the LR start-up backup set for? If you haven't deliberately deleted any of those, they should all be there, in whatever backup destination you've chosen. I say that in case any of those are newer than the week old Time Machine backup.

Both the TM and Lr backup *.lrcat files are fundamentally just working copies of your catalog. You can open them by:
a) simply double clicking on the *.lrcat files.
b) Start Lr while holding down the ctrl(cmd?) key which should open a dialog allowing you to choose a catalog to open. Navigate to one of the backup copies and open it.

The thing that confuses a lot of people, at this point, is that if you have the option to always open the last catalog, Lr will remember keep using your backup catalog in the backup up location. Once you've identified and verified your most recent working backup, it pays to copy it to your normal working location for it, and reopen from there.

The *.lrdata package/folder is not critical to this restoration. It will be rebuilt automatically.

Edit: Ooops, I see Rob's on the case already!
 
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