Why is copying the Catalog so slow

[OleThomasen]

Hi - I am Ole (Danish) and Lr and LrC user since 2007.
During the years I have piled up around 60,000 photos.
Pictures occupy appr. 2 Tb and Catalog appr. 85 Gb (75850 files, 56350 folders)
I keep them on external HD and make frequent backups. incremental and sometime total.
The photos is reasonable fastto back up - but total backup of the catalog makes you think computer has stopped.
It takes very very long time (about 10 hours)
My laptop is a HP 250 G8 with 64 Gb ram 1 Tb internal HD (ssd)
Any ideas to speed up will be welcome
Thanks
Ole

 

[clee01l]

When you exit the Lightroom Classic app, Lightroom makes a copy of the catalog in a temporary area of your disk drive. It then proceeds to optimize the catalog. (that is it checks the database for referential integrity, rebuilds indexes and other database house keeping chores). If you do not have at least 100GB of free space on C:\ then Windows is starved for resources and everything slows down as Windows tried to make do with the limiter free space on C:\. The Back up on Exiting Arc should never take more than a few minutes.

The Catalog file (*.lrcat) should not exceed 4GB. If it does, then you probably have lots of local adjustments and or lots of detritus that got accidentally left behind by (mostly) poorly written plug-ins to old app bugs.
If you use the "Export as Catalog..." then only the "good" stuff will get copied and the detritus left behind. This clean catalog should back up in minutes not hours.

 

[PhilBurton]

Hi - I am Ole (Danish) and Lr and LrC user since 2007.
During the years I have piled up around 60,000 photos.
Pictures occupy appr. 2 Tb and Catalog appr. 85 Gb (75850 files, 56350 folders)
I keep them on external HD and make frequent backups. incremental and sometime total.
The photos is reasonable fastto back up - but total backup of the catalog makes you think computer has stopped.
It takes very very long time (about 10 hours)
My laptop is a HP 250 G8 with 64 Gb ram 1 Tb internal HD (ssd)
Any ideas to speed up will be welcome
Thanks
Ole

Can you move the catalog to the SSD?

 

[Gnits]

How are you backing up the catalog. Are you also backing up the Preview files? What software are you using.

 

[Philippe Coudé du Foresto]

My understanding is that you're are using a backup software to copy all the files (catalog, previews and photos) to your backup device.
If this is correct, the delay you're seing might be caused by the copy of the preview folder which contains a lot of files and therefore takes a lot of time. In case of disaster, LrC will allways be able to rebuild the previews as long as you have the catalog and the originals. There is no need to have them in your backup. So I would suggest to exclude the preview folder from your backup, this will save time and disk space.