Lightroom folder synchonization issue. Suggestions for resolution?

All of the photos in my Lightroom library are on a network drive. The libraries for my individual Lightroom installations are on the hard-drives of the individual computers. I regularly synchronize my folders to keep my libraries up to date. For the most part, this works well for me.

The problem is that I have around 5000 files that, for whatever reason, Lightroom can't import into the library of any of my individual Lightroom installations, Mac or PC. Every single time I synchronize my folders, Lightroom tries to synchronize those 5000 files again, and it fails again. I'm pretty sure that the problem files are corrupted duplicates of RAW files that are already in my Lightroom libraries.

Is there a setting somewhere in Lightroom that will allow me to tell Lightroom to stop trying to sychronize files that is has attempted to import once before and failed on?

It will be an onerous task to try to manually move the problem files to a different location on my network drive, as it looks like they're scattered all over the place. I'm not even sure how I would go about identifying them at this point.

In the Import dialog in the File Handling section, there should be an option to "Don't Import Suspected Duplicates". So, have that option selected.

Then, I would find one of these "problem" files, ensure that it is a duplicate (same filename), and try to Import it individually.

If that works, you are in business to do the batch of files. If not, well, let us know, maybe there will be other ideas!

tonylong wrote in post #18009075
In the Import dialog in the File Handling section, there should be an option to "Don't Import Suspected Duplicates". So, have that option selected.

Then, I would find one of these "problem" files, ensure that it is a duplicate (same filename), and try to Import it individually.

If that works, you are in business to do the batch of files. If not, well, let us know, maybe there will be other ideas!

That didn't work.

I was able to find some of the files. And, to the best of my satisfaction, I was able to determine that they were corrupted duplicates that contained no exif data and were not able to be opened by anything. It took a bunch of examination and poking around. The corrupted files are exactly the same size as the file that came after it. The corrupted files have a creation date of six hours before the files they're duplicates of. Whole folders are effected, but not all of the folders are effected.

Using a freeware Windows software package name "Advanced Renamer," which bundles "Exif Viewer" into its installation, I'm able to rename the corrupted RAW files by adding an attribute created by Exif Viewer. Then, I search for "*error.CR2" in Windows Explorer, and I'm able to move the corrupted files to a different location on my network drive.

It is taking a long time to crunch through all of the files, but it is working well.

Well, good!

Our high-tech systems can have a veritable variety of things that can cause problems of all types. It's good that you found a fix for your files! The next strep would be to troubleshoot: what was the cause of the problem?

The approach can be common sense: First, make sure you can repeat the problem following the exact same procedures, then if you can do that then replace one element of your hardware. Or, you can check if the hard drive has problems by using a different path to store your copied files.

If you can't repeat the problem, well, therein lies a challenge...one thing you can do is use the same setup and "hammer" your gear, running repeated tests, checking repeatedly until you see a problem. If you do, exchange one bit of gear and repeat!

If you can't repeat the problem after thousands of tries, well, you are pretty well stuck until the problem reappears! At least if you can repeat the problem, you can swiftly replace things such as cards and card readers and cables to hopefully eliminate the "easiest" troublemakers!

I don't know if I'll be able to identify what the exact cause on the problem was. I can only guess. The last effected folder is 2015-03-26, which is right about the time I got my NAS.

I copied all of my RAW files, from all of my computers and external drives, to the NAS. I didn't allow anything to overwrite, I set everything to "rename" in the event of duplicates. Once everything was copied over, I ran a duplicate file finder that compared and identified duplicates based checksums.

I removed the duplicates, and renamed the files with a new file naming convention. The corrupted files slipped through the initial deletion process, probably because they have different checksums from the uncorrupted file. That will be why the corrupted files are named inline with the uncorrupted ones. It is a good thing they do, or I might have deleted the uncorrupted files and kept the corrupted ones.

My best guess is that the corrupted files came from the clone drive on my PC workstation. It has three drives, an SSD and two HDDs. One of the HDDs was my working drive, while the second one was a clone of that.

Based on the speed things are going, I should have it all sorted out and corrected by Thursday.