Lightroom: Crash and Recovery

I just had a Lightroom crash. It took me a day of figuring what caused the crash, then came the work of recovering from the crash.

Usually, Lightroom doesn't crash unless there a problem somewhere else. The keyword here is “usually”. For me, it was a change in the operating system. At first, I thought that it was the drive that was corrupted.

There's no point in trying to recover the Lightroom catalog if the cause of the crash has not been clearly identified, because it will crash again, and again…

The question was “is it a software problem or an hardware problem?” For me it turned out that it was both the software and the hardware that caused the problem. The networking would time-out and corrupt the SQLite catalog. It was both the networking card and the networking driver. Once that was fixed, it was time to recover my Lightroom catalogs.

1. I have backups and full backups.
2. Never, ever let Lightroom repair your catalog, always click cancel. Often when Lightroom repairs the catalog, the catalog gets even more corrupted and you will lose more and more…
3. Make a special copy of the corrupted catalog before doing anything.

What about the last backup? In my case, it didn't help, the lastr backup was also corrupted, and the one before and the one before… My last 5 backups had the same problem. That why you need to have multiple rolling backups and that's why differential backup do not work in real life.

My dilemma was to use the last working backup backup and lose the very extensive changes or just try to recover. I went the route of trying to recover.

Steps for recovery

1. Highlight the Lightroom icon/shortcut
2. For Windows press the Control key and the Enter key at the same time. For Mac change the Control key to the Command key.
3. You will get a window that asks which catalog to open or create new catalog. Select: Create a New Catalog at the bottom.
4. Lightroom will start with a brand new, empty catalog.
5. Go into the catalog preferences and set all your various options.
6. File > Import from Catalog… and select the old “crashed” catalog.
7. If the old Lightroom catalog is not completely corrupted, Lightroom should able to read enough of the catalog to get the collections and the images.
8. Then import. That what I did, and it worked for me.

If it doesn't work, you will have to resort to the backups. The problem with my backups was that the catalog was corrupted a week ago, but I didn't hit the corruption operation until 2 days ago.

12-Oct-2011: Update

Not yet, I claimed victory too soon, see: Lightroom Crash: Claimed Victory Too Soon