Windows tried to murder my Lightroom catalog

rexbobcat

Been spending a lot of time on here!
Joined
Nov 28, 2011
Messages
5,014
Reaction score
1,967
Location
United States
Can others edit my Photos
Photos OK to edit
So I'm just sitting here editing away, then I go to switch to Library mode and a dialogue box comes up saying "Lightroom has encountered an error and needs to close."

I'm thinking, alright, it must have been a bug or I ran out of RAM or something. I go to open it again and "This catalog is corrupt. Would you like to repair." Then, "This catalog cannot be repaired. Try again?"

I'm sitting here thinking that Windows ate my catalog. Thankfully, after I rebooted, the catalog did repair and I didn't lose anything, but still, this is the first time this has happened.

I'm also using the newest version of Lightroom CC, if anyone is curious.

What's the worst loss/almost loss of photos (negatives or digital) that you've experienced?
 
My Wifey lost a lot of photos because of hard drive failure and no backup. It was a WD 3TB external.
My argument was that if they were that important, she would have backed them up, or perhaps already shared them on Flickr so no big deal. I ducked just in time as the skillet passed over my head :).
 
No lost images, but what version of Win are you running?....just curious.....
 
Lightroom, by default should make a backup of the catalog pretty regularly. Short of a complete hard drive failure (assuming the backup catalogs are on the same drive as the main catalog), the worst case scenario is that you will have to revert to the latest backup - - in which case you would lose all your edits and would have to redo them, but only since the last backup. My catalog backs up about once a week. You can set it to back up more or less frequently, but I left in on the default so about once a week is what it would do if you did nothing (assuming you let it back up every time it wants to).

I'm not sure if you are aware, but the catalog has nothing to do with the picture files, so just because you lose your catalog does not mean you've lost your original RAW (or JPEG) files; just what you've done to them in Lightroom. In the case of a hard drive failure, you have bigger problems than just losing your catalog; you'd lose the pictures as well. You should always keep an off-site backup of the picture files for this reason.
 
No lost images, but what version of Win are you running?....just curious.....

It's Windows 7 64 bit. I'm still disgusted by Windows 10, so I haven't upgraded.
 
Lightroom, by default should make a backup of the catalog pretty regularly. Short of a complete hard drive failure (assuming the backup catalogs are on the same drive as the main catalog), the worst case scenario is that you will have to revert to the latest backup - - in which case you would lose all your edits and would have to redo them, but only since the last backup. My catalog backs up about once a week. You can set it to back up more or less frequently, but I left in on the default so about once a week is what it would do if you did nothing (assuming you let it back up every time it wants to).

I'm not sure if you are aware, but the catalog has nothing to do with the picture files, so just because you lose your catalog does not mean you've lost your original RAW (or JPEG) files; just what you've done to them in Lightroom. In the case of a hard drive failure, you have bigger problems than just losing your catalog; you'd lose the pictures as well. You should always keep an off-site backup of the picture files for this reason.

I know that the actual photos wouldn't be gone, but if I lost the catalog (which had 1000+ photos over a year), I'd probably not even go back to edit them because I'd already sunk at least 20 hours into doing so. It's rather annoying, because this wasn't even a hardware failure. It was a Lightroom/Windows "Oopsie."
 
I agree....no Win 10 for me, until I absolutely have to.....
 
What's the worst loss/almost loss of photos (negatives or digital) that you've experienced?
Wifey scanned all our old transparencies and then the hard drive crashed. This was before we had even heard of hard drives crashing, so no backup.
 

Most reactions

New Topics

Back
Top