Backup problem with Lightroom

I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong here. I'm running Lightroom on an iMac. I've got it set to prompt me to do backups daily. When

I do these backups, there appears to be no problem backing up to my main drive, but I'd like to do the automatic catalog backups to an

external drive in case my main drive crashes. When I select an external drive, however, the process just hangs, and eventually times out.

An error message appears that Lightroom could not do the backup.

I've tried to work around the problem by backing up to my main drive, then copying the lrcat backup file to the external drive, but I get an

error message: "The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in "Lightroom Catalog.lrcat" could not be read or written.

(Error Code -36)"

What's going on?

I think I may have an answer to my own question. During further experimentation with a second external drive, I was able to

copy the backup file directly from the main hard drive, without the Error Code -36 message. I also discovered that when I

tried to copy a non- photo-related file to the first external drive, I also got the Error Code -36 message. I'm thinking my

problem isn't a Lightroom problem so much as a computer problem. Although I haven't yet tried backing up to the second

hard drive directly from Lightroom, I imagine the problem with the backup from within Lightroom probably fails for the same

reason the direct copying fails -- whatever the -36 means.

Agreed, sounds more like an issue with the drive itself than LR.'s back up. All my LR catalogs are on a different drive than

the boot disk and back up fine.

System Error Code -36 is an I/O error. It means you have some kind of I/O problem ... a bad cable, a bad controller, a

disk going bad, a file system problem, etc. A discussion of this error is in progress on the Apple Discussions forum at

present, see <br>

<a href="http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7584524" target=new1>

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7584524</a><br>

There are also incidences where a -36 error is returned when connecting to a Windows (Samba) volume documented in

various forums. It is not specifically related to Lightroom at all.

<br><br>

The first thing I would do would be to boot up your system using a Mac OS X distribution DVD (either the one that came

with your computer or either the Tiger or Leopard retail DVDs). Instead of running the installer, go to the Utilities menu

and run Disk Utility. Make sure that the external drive you want to use is connected and powered up. Run a Verify

operation on all volumes. If Disk Utility reports any errors, attempt a Repair operation on all volumes with errors.

<br><br>

If there were no errors, the problem might be a bad cable or a hard drive failure starting to happen, being intermittent.

Replace the cable with a known good cable, or a new good cable. If you can get the error to occur on a regular basis and

you've got a known good cable, immediately get another hard drive and back up all your data to it.

<br><br>

You might at that point run some hardware test software on it and see what's up. Peachpit has an article on the "The Top

Five Mac Hard Drive, Diagnostic, and Repair Utilities" at <br>

<a href="http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=693649" target=new3>

http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=693649</a><br>which is likely worth looking at.

<br><br>

I've sometimes found a drive acting up this way responds well to a low-level reformat and is afterwards perfectly reliable.

<br><br>

Godfrey

<br>

Godfrey:

Thanks so much for the detailed response. I'll try those things.

Barry