Repair of corrupted catalogs

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Tomiron

Tomiron

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Trying to open a corrupt catalog of mine makes LR freeze forcing me to kill the actual LR-process to proceed. I also need to delete the preference files to start LR again. It is not possible to import any data from the corrupted catalog to a new one. (My latest backup catalog works just fine though, but lacks quite a few hours of work...)

Is there by any chance a way to check integrity or do any other kind of catalogue repair of corrupted catalogs that doesn't open in LR? If I'd been more of a tech-pro I'd might been successful in using sqlite3 or sqlite analyzer to check the database. Now is that not the case..

I'm aware of that holding down the Alt-key (on Win) or Opt-key (on Mac) while simultaneously clicking on the LR icon in the dock cause LR to open but not to open the default catalog. Instead it shows a dialog with a list of available catalogs and an option to create check integrity of each catalog. In my case - this doesn't work. If I choose my corrupted catalog following this procedure this will still cause LR to crash.

Working in LR 4, Win7 64 bit, 4GB RAM, accessing catalog and previews from an external drive, images stored on a multiHD-NAS.
 
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I too have a corrupt LR Catalogue from my desktop crashing. I've tried the SQLite, but now at the end of the process that I was VERY hopeful would be successful, is a huge body of lines reading "Error: near line 335733: Expression tree is too large (maximum depth 1000) (and the 334733 is only one of a gazillion lines with a different number.) Have I lost all hope at recovering this catalog? The file is not empty, and what was rebuilt is also about 792,112 kb, so there is data. Can anyone help? Thank you. I'm new here.
 
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You're welcome to zip up the catalog (one you haven't played with) and send it to me using www.wetransfer.com to [email protected] and I'll see if the LR engineer has any better luck with it.
 
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Oh Thank you SO much! Yes, I will upload it this morning! I truly appreciate it and will be forever grateful if it can be recovered.
Just the catalog, or do you need preview files or anything?
 
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Got it Pam. I've forwarded it to the engineer, but it doesn't look promising here, so I think it's probably time to restore one of your backups. (I hope you had backups!!)
 
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um.... no backups... that's why I'm frantic Otherwise I would've done that first.
 
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PamElla said:
um.... no backups... that's why I'm frantic Otherwise I would've done that first.
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Oh dear, so sorry to hear that. I guess you'll be paranoid about backups in future!
 
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YES I am.... I have multiple drives and multiple catalogs. Some are individual, some are a part of a master. I don't know why, but it was a habit to always skip backups. Stupid, I know.... don't need scolding, (and you didn't) the thought of losing all of that work is punishment enough. And I know better, I have also lost whole drives --- one to dropping, the other to just malfunction. At least the actual image files are all backed up now. (and yes, DriveSavers recovered the broken one. The other one just started working again and was backed up immediately)
 
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Victoria Bampton said:
Got it Pam. I've forwarded it to the engineer, but it doesn't look promising here, so I think it's probably time to restore one of your backups. (I hope you had backups!!)
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Thank you so much! I do appreciate you forwarding it on and looking at it. I am definitely going to back up from now on, probably as I work. This is HORRIBLE. I'm just getting started as a new sole proprietor and I'm at a level of production I didn't expect. This is crashing and burning before I ever get started. Ugggh! Thank you again. I am so appreciative of your response.
 
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Oh so sorry to hear that Pam. It's a stressful time for sure!
 
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In case it helps you get back on your feet, there are companies that can handle the raw processing for you, albeit at a cost.
 
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Oh PamElla, I've just heard back from Paul. He said he saw your post on the Adobe Forums and has already sent you back a partially repaired catalog. He's not sure how much was lost, as it was badly corrupted, but it's a much better scenario than we hoped for.
 
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So far I've only noticed a copy of an edited image was not recoverable. I've lost not much! I'm completely over the moon! Thank you Thank youthank you!!!!!
 
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Paul rocks! Glad he was able to get most of it restored.
 
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YES he does! I'm afraid I ran into an individual who was quite the opposite of Paul, and was not helpful at all. (actually he was a jerk, and if he is a representative of Adobe, he is a very poor one.) I gave him that feedback! Thank you! this forum was way more friendly! Thank you!
 
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PamElla said:
I'm afraid I ran into an individual who was quite the opposite of Paul, and was not helpful at all. (actually he was a jerk, and if he is a representative of Adobe, he is a very poor one.) I gave him that feedback! Thank you! this forum was way more friendly! Thank you!
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Thank you, we do our best. We pride ourselves on always being friendly, even if we can't solve the problem (although sometimes don't come over in writing in quite the way we intended!).

The official Adobe forums get an awful lot of traffic, and sometimes in a rush to cover all posts, things are said without thinking. I've known Jim online a long time, and he's not a bad guy, but yes, he did dig himself into a hole this time. Isn't it always at the worst times, too?!

Anyway, make yourself at home, and hopefully we can help you avoid any further problems. I'm glad it all worked out ok in the end.
 
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Having read the exchange, obviously things went on a spiral, but I do feel it's important to avoid mistaking direct questions for rudeness.
 
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Does anyone have experience with rebuilding catalog files that weren't corrupt to begin with, but were accidentally deleted and the recovered and THAT actually hurt them? I've had no luck rebuilding these catalogs using SQLite in a couple of cases and it seems when you recover a deleted catalog file, it doesn't have the original data. Can anyone confirm that?
 
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I think the only person who might be able to confirm this would be Victoria's contact at Adobe (and Victoria's away at the moment so unlikely to be able to ask him), though from my own experience of such issues I can't recall a catalog being restored successfully after being recovered by a file recovery utility. Some of the other long-standing members here might have a different recollection.
 
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Hi Jim. Thanks for the quick response. That's exactly what i thought. When i tried rebuilding, it wouldn't even let me open the database in a database viewer. The viewer always asked for a password as it considered the file to be encrypted. I also asked on Stackoverflow and people much more experienced with SQL databases said that a recovery utility would only produce a file full of "garbage data" and it just would not contain the original data. Just what you said. Thanks for confirming so i won't waste more time with those recovered catalogs.
 
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Normally, Holger, one would not expect the LR database to be password protected. FYI.
 
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John, it's not that the Lightroom database is password protected. It's what the recover utility does with the database during the process what makes the database viewer "think" it would be encrypted and password protected. FYI.
 
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holgermischke said:
Does anyone have experience with rebuilding catalog files that weren't corrupt to begin with, but were accidentally deleted and the recovered and THAT actually hurt them? I've had no luck rebuilding these catalogs using SQLite in a couple of cases and it seems when you recover a deleted catalog file, it doesn't have the original data. Can anyone confirm that?
Click to expand...

I've been scouring the internet for over a day trying to figure out how to recover my deleted lrcat (I don't recall deleting it, but it's definitely not on my harddrive, nor are my backup files!) ugh. I downloaded Disk Drill and it recovered many lrcat files - but now I don't know what to do with them (nor figure out which is my last one used). I do have a time machine back up from about a week ago, but I am trying to recover edits from a wedding I just finished yesterday (fingers crossed). Any help would be appreciated. Worst off, I will have to re-edit that wedding and half of another.
 
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Upgraded my Windows 10 the day before yesterday and used Lightroom for the first time yetserday. No problems to open the latest catalog (named "2015-2017") and worked for a long time cataloging and deleting a backlog of work. I left the computer with LR opened during the night and it seems like the computer switched off unexpectedly during the night.
Now this morning, I get the message: The catalog is damaged and that Lightroom will try to repair it. When I click OK and it tries to repair but gets back with the message that it failed and can make a new try. It never succeeds no matter how many tries I ask LR to do.
So, I first got the impression that something had happened to the catalog "2015-2017" which is my current catalog but then I tried to start Lightroom by opening another catalog that had not been used since a long time back and it behaved exactly the same way. Tried a third catalog, also not used in a while, and it gives the same error messages and suggestions to repair the catalogs. This indicates that the fault is not actually a corrupt catalog but rather somewhere in Lightrooms startup procedure. Could that be the case?
I have tried to search the internet for a solution but never come across this situation where all catalogs give the same error.

I don't want to fiddle around trying to repair catalogs if the fault is somewhere else. Please give me an advice on how to proceed.

Best regards, Jens Birch
 
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