And by back up I mean burn to disk and put away in a safe location. Don't rely on remote backups which are constantly overwritten.
I had a hard drive go bad last year. I managed to pull all of the data off the drive with no casualties (or so I thought). Apparently all of my Lightroom libraries corrupted and are no longer readable or repairable by Lightroom. At the time I had no reason to suspect anything was wrong, so over the course of the next 6-8 weeks all of my backups (Backblaze, external HDDs) were overwritten.
By the time I figured out the libraries were bad, all of my "good" backups had been overwritten and I was left with two full years of corrupt libraries. Yes, I still have the RAWs and still have the edited jpegs, but all of the "edits" in Lightroom are now gone. For the time being I'm holding on to the libraries in home of finding some way to repair them, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
The weird thing about this whole debacle is that the libraries were the ONLY data casualty on the entire 1.5TB drive that went bad. Nothing else was corrupted and nothing else was lost. Apparently the libraries are especially fragile. Who knows.
My advise would be to test "finish" libraries, then back up them to disk and put them away safe. Standard revolving backups failed me big time here.
Sorry to hear that. What about sidecar xml's? My libraries do not have my edits tied to them because I have my edits stored in the sidecar files. I started doing this because I once had a library go bad.
amonline wrote:
By "all" libraries, I assume you have numerous catalogs. What I don't understand is how multiple catalogs would get corrupted without your knowledge.
I generally create a new library about every 3 months (so, 4 per year).
Apparently as the hard drive was going bad, it corrupted ALL of my libraries without my knowledge. All of the files were normal size and appeared to be intact so I never suspected anything to be wrong. None of my other data was lost or corrupted.
Note that at the time it was 2012 and my "working" libraries were on a different disk, and therefore fine. The libraries I lost were from years 2010 and 2011.
The directory system in LR is the most archaic mess of any program I have ever used. You constantly have to hop all over the screen, in and out of directories to accomplish the most simple tasks. Utter rubbish. If you ever decide to relocate or or re-organize your base files , good luck.
All that being said I love the editing capabilities; now if it just had layers.....
Vancouver47 wrote:
The directory system in LR is the most archaic mess of any program I have ever used. You constantly have to hop all over the screen, in and out of directories to accomplish the most simple tasks. Utter rubbish. If you ever decide to relocate or or re-organize your base files , good luck.
All that being said I love the editing capabilities; now if it just had layers.....
what? the catalog is all self contained in 1 folder. you can even move that folder around from one drive to another. if you move the imported raw files then LR can automatically "re-link" them. its not hard.
and a basic layer option would be nice, but if you NEED layers then there is a fancy program called photoshop
My editing situation results in me never having more than one wedding in-process at any given time, and therefore the most I could lose from a corrupt catalog is a few days' work on that single wedding. I suppose that's a minimal built-in insurance policy for me.
form wrote:
My editing situation results in me never having more than one wedding in-process at any given time, and therefore the most I could lose from a corrupt catalog is a few days' work on that single wedding. I suppose that's a minimal built-in insurance policy for me.
I didn't lose any "current" working libraries, but I did lose ALL of my past libraries on my storage hard drive. The exact same thing could happen to anyone.
Error propagation and viruses are common issues with rotating backup systems. If you go away from rotating backups, then you will have to worry about bit rot
It sucks that it bit you this time, but at least you did not trash any raw files.
write changes to xmp. backup just the xmp's into another folder in addition to your regular backups (take up almost no additional space). safety net = secure
morganb4 wrote:
Wouldnt it be cool to be able to do all your edits and then batch commit to sidecar after the work is done?
I believe you can select the photos you worked on then press Ctrl+S to save the metadata to the files (assuming that you have the automatic option turned off).
stevez32 wrote:
Will this only affect new files that you open and edit? Is there a way to tell LR to go through and create XMP for everything it knows about?
-S
Make the changes in the preferences...go to "all photos"...select all....control-s (or in the menu in develop module...photo/save metadata to file)...wait for it to finish
that should do it to all of the images in your library
deepbluejh wrote:
I generally create a new library about every 3 months (so, 4 per year).
Apparently as the hard drive was going bad, it corrupted ALL of my libraries without my knowledge. All of the files were normal size and appeared to be intact so I never suspected anything to be wrong. None of my other data was lost or corrupted.
Note that at the time it was 2012 and my "working" libraries were on a different disk, and therefore fine. The libraries I lost were from years 2010 and 2011.
Are you saying that ONLY LR catalogs were affected? You lost nothing else on the drive?
joelconner wrote:
Make the changes in the preferences...go to "all photos"...select all....control-s (or in the menu in develop module...photo/save metadata to file)...wait for it to finish
that should do it to all of the images in your library
I'd have Adobe look at those files. That just doesn't sound right. I'm betting it's an easy fix, and was probably an error during encryption or some other conversion that could be easily fixed; maybe even from one specific LR release to another. It just sounds very questionable and I don't see how a failing drive could voluntarily choose to damage only LR catalog files. It sounds like something very simple is getting missed.
