lightroom catalog backup

[carole_lehrman]

<p>I have a Macbook Pro and the latest Lightroom CC. When I went to backup my catalog, I got a message that said,<br>

"Catalog more than 4 GB. Use a third party utility such as 7 Zip or Stuffitexpander to extract your catalog<br>

backup". I don't really know what to do.<br>

Thanks,<br>

Carole</p>

[ellis_vener_photography]

Never seen that message before and my catalog is nearly 300GB.

[marc_rochkind]

<p>The word "extract" suggests to me that this message comes not from creating a backup, but perhaps from restoring from a backup. Or, perhaps you are accessing a backup outside of Lightroom?</p>

<p>Anyway, 4GB is the limit for traditional ZIP files. For bigger ZIP files, so-called ZIP64 has to be used, as I recall. (Reference documentation not at hand, so I may have the name slightly wrong.) Many unZIPping utilities can't handle ZIP64, which is why those other apps are being suggested.</p>

<p>The question is, suggested by what? Lightroom should have no need to unZIP anything in order to create a backup.</p>

<p>So, my guess is that you are not creating a backup from within Lightroom, but are doing something else.</p>

[JosvanEekelen]

<p>If I´m not mistaken this is an OS problem, not supporting files larger than 4 GB. <br>

Backup your catalog manually: first locate it, go to catalog settings and choose "show" in the general tab. This will open the location of the catalog, you can then manually backup the .lrcat file. LR will normally store a .zip file, you can use a 3rd party zip program.</p>

[howard_m]

<p>Take a read of this:<br>

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/extract-large-catalog-backup-macOS.html</p>

<p>This is not an 'OS' issue. OSX has been full 64bit for a long time. That doesn't mean all the utilities (aka zip/unzip) are 64bit friendly, compression utils are notorious for this as many of them effectively pre-date 64bit</p>

[JosvanEekelen]

<p>@Howard: thanks for correcting me. According to the link you provided updating to the very last LR version seems to solve the issue. Personally I'd wait a couple of days to see whether there are any issues with the leatest LR version.</p>

[marc_rochkind]

<p>OK, with these responses, I think the situation is clear. Carole's message doesn't mean she didn't get a good backup. That message is advice that she might have to use if she ever needs to do a restore.</p>

[howard_m]

<p>That is my read of it also.</p>

[ellis_vener_photography]

Ironically, I just encountered this message for the first time yesterday! This came after upgrading to Lightroom CC 2015.8

andit is clearly an Adobe generated warning.

 

When you click procced the program proceeds with creating a back up of the catalog which I assume is uncompressed. I haven't needed to restore Lr from a backup so am in a double Heisenberg uncertainty state here about the status of the backup. Is it compressed or not? And whether compressed or uncompressed, is it corrupt or not?

[howard_m]

<p>I do not think the issue is that the file is/is-not compressed, my read of it is that it is compressed but that the OS provided decompressor wont work. There are a number of other decompress programs out there.<br>

The decompressor will simply flag/tell you if it doesn't find a valid compressed file and stop, it wont cause additional damage. You can use the command line 'file' command to see if it is compressed (although that wont test integrity).</p>