Catalogue problem in Lightroom 5

It seems as though I have screwed up my catalogues in Lightroom.

I have LR set to ask me each time I quit if I want to backup. Last night I went to close Lightroom, and told it to go ahead and create a backup, stupid me went into the folder where previous backups are kept, and decided to delete some older backups while Lightroom was making the current backup. Lightroom presented an error message and I can only surmise that because I was screwing around in the directory in which it makes backups, that somehow the backup failed. Then, when I went to quit and relaunch LR, I lost several days worth of work. Not to mention many hours of culling crap photos and edits to good photos.

Is there a way to get back to where I was previously?

if you are on a windows pc check the recycle bin.good luck

Its a mac

already emptied the recycle bin

Silver-Halide wrote in post #17507420
Its a mac

Do you use Time Machine? If you do, you may be able to retrieve the old catalog.

Yes, but clearly not regularly enough. I have a backup on my hard drive more recent than the last time I plugged into my external drive and ran Time Machine. I suppose I'll do it now.

I'm mainly confused why the current catalogue was lost

Silver-Halide wrote in post #17507622
I'm mainly confused why the current catalogue was lost

Did you have the Optimise Catalog option ticked? If so then I assume LR would have been re-writing the current catalog. Of course I would expect it to finish doing that before exiting. Did it exit normally or crash?

Also are you sure you are opening your working catalog and that LR isn't trying to access a backup? Just double check by doing a manual "Open catalog" and navigating to the current working catalog.

Dan Marchant wrote in post #17507664
Did you have the Optimise Catalog option ticked? If so then I assume LR would have been re-writing the current catalog. Of course I would expect it to finish doing that before exiting. Did it exit normally or crash?

Yes, I have optimize catalog checked. Not sure what that does. I believe it exited normally after failing to write the backup. I'm pretty sure I didn't chose the new directory to delete

Ok that much makes sense to me I opened the 'current' catalogue manually and it seems as though its even further back in time than the backup I'd rather use. Its the same catalogue that opens when I just click the lightroom icon

So maybe my last 3-5 hours of work are gone forever The backup I want to revert the catalogue to is about a week old.
1. How do I do this?
2. How do I keep from effing this up again--other than to run more backups and time machine..

Silver-Halide wrote in post #17507993
The backup I want to revert the catalogue to is about a week old.
1. How do I do this?

The simple way is to just open it using the manual selection method mentioned above. By default Lightroom will always open and use whichever catalog it used last. So once you open the backup LR will continue to use that catalog until you tell it to open another one.

But it will be using the catalog from the backup folder, which generally isn't considered good practice as it can lead to later confusion over which files are backups and which is the working catalog. The better thing to do is copy the backup catalog file that you want to use to the folder that LR normally uses to store the catalog and then open that copy.

Dan Marchant wrote in post #17508689
The simple way is to just open it using the manual selection method mentioned above. By default Lightroom will always open and use whichever catalog it used last. So once you open the backup LR will continue to use that catalog until you tell it to open another one.

But it will be using the catalog from the backup folder, which generally isn't considered good practice as it can lead to later confusion over which files are backups and which is the working catalog. The better thing to do is copy the backup catalog file that you want to use to the folder that LR normally uses to store the catalog and then open that copy.

Ok, I'm going to do what you say and copy the Lr5 catalogue from the best backup available and move it to the normal directory. But now I wonder: do I need to move the catalogue.lrcat AND the catalogue LR5 Previews.lrdata file as well or just the catalogue file?

Also wondering: Why do some of the folders created on various dates have the Previews file and others do not?

Thanks.

Silver-Halide wrote in post #17519299
Ok, I'm going to do what you say and copy the Lr5 catalogue from the best backup available and move it to the normal directory. But now I wonder: do I need to move the catalogue.lrcat AND the catalogue LR5 Previews.lrdata file as well or just the catalogue file?

Also wondering: Why do some of the folders created on various dates have the Previews file and others do not?

Thanks.

Something "does not compute" here. In seven years of using LR in various Window systems and backing up the catalog well more than a thousand times, I have never seen it back up the Previews.lrdata folder. Always only a single .lrcat file in a dated sub-folder inside the designated backup folder. Of course, in Mac it may be doing it differently, but I'll assume not until somebody tells me otherwise. I have also just checked with LR 5.7.1's Catalog Settings, Preferences and Backup Confirmation window just to see if there is something I have overlooked in the past. Nada.

So that raises some questions: Where are you backing up to? Is it to the same (My) Pictures/Lightroom folder in which your working catalog and Previews.lrdata are located? Are you becoming confused as to which is the working catalog and which is the backup? Since the working catalog must always have a Previews.lrdata folder next to it (in the same folder), if you have turned a backup .lrcat into an active working catalog without copying it to the original folder where the original catalog and previews are, replacing the original, and thus it sits alone in some folder, either the dated backup folder or another, it will generate a new (duplicate) set of previews. That is the only way that I can think of that you would have multiple sets of previews referring to the same photos and to the same catalog or clones of it.

LR does not backup previews because there is no need for it. The catalog can always create new ones as needed (and is constantly doing so). Moreover, it would be a huge waste of space; the Previews.lrdata folder is around five times larger than the catalog.lrcat file, even when it contains only low res previews (mine are 2048 pixels and 1:1 previews are discarded after a week).

"Backups" that are done to the same drive where the master catalog(s) is/are located are rolling the dice, but I wouldn't call them real backups. If the catalog becomes corrupt they might save you (if the corruption occurred after the backup was made), but if the drive goes down, you are at the not very tender mercies of recovery software.

My own setup is as follows (not recommending, just saying): I run two catalogs, "Old" and "Current Year", but they and their previews are not located at the LR default spot on the C: drive but rather on an external SSD called Q: Backups are made to a Google Drive folder on C: from which they are then uploaded to Google's cloud and copied to another external called Z: which also receives backups from other sources. Once a month, Z: and another external (X: a 64 GB USB stick ) are backed up to an external Y:, which is kept off-site.

I also suggest getting some form of a network attached storage to host your main time machine backup, rather than relying on plugging in an external drive directly to the computer. Generally isn't nearly as fast to backup large changes, but anytime I'm home my laptop will happily make backups without me having to think about them.

Good luck getting things sorted out. I haven't seen lightroom do something that odd with the backup files before, but might dig into it when I get home if I get the chance.