# How to uninstall and reinstall Lightroom Classic



## Mr_RossDuncan (Mar 31, 2019)

Hi, I've had a long slow death roll event happening with my Lightroom Classic CC application.
I'm running version 8.1 on a Windows 10 laptop.
The actual program is running off the laptop Crive while  the catalog and all it's folders (helper, previews, LrData etc.) are all stored on an external hard-drive.
Running Lightroom has become more and more difficult with various freezing issues, bugs as well as the main issue of the catalog not being able to be backed-up, each time a back-up is attempted the program freezes and eventually generates a crash report, on start-up next time an error message pops up "Lightroom needs to restart etc etc."
I want to uninstall my version of Lightroom Classic CC and download another version, navigate to my last saved back-up, which is now over a month old, and see if it resolves my multitude of issues.
I don't want to lose anything important so the question is, can I just delete/uninstall my lightroom folder off the Crive, leaving all the catalog folders on my external hard-drive and expect things to go smoothly?
Thanks


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## Hal P Anderson (Mar 31, 2019)

An uninstall followed by a reinstall should cause you no problems at all. 

You can back up your catalogue just by copying it (with Lightroom _*not*_ running) somewhere safe using Windows Explorer. Or create a zip file of it. There's nothing special about how Lightroom creates a copy, except that it guarantees that the catalogue is closed and fully updated when it does.


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## Rob_Cullen (Mar 31, 2019)

Any Un-install and Install procedures should be done with the Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop App-
Click the down-arrow and the 'Manage' option:










Sometimes a complete 'Clean' and re-install can correct installation problems-
https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/kb/cc-cleaner-tool-installation-problems.html?PID=7221644


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## Mr_RossDuncan (Apr 1, 2019)

Hal P Anderson said:


> An uninstall followed by a reinstall should cause you no problems at all.
> 
> You can back up your catalogue just by copying it (with Lightroom _*not*_ running) somewhere safe using Windows Explorer. Or create a zip file of it. There's nothing special about how Lightroom creates a copy, except that it guarantees that the catalogue is closed and fully updated when it does.


Hi Hal,
Thanks for the quick response to my problems, much appreciated.
I'll take your suggestion to back-up the catalog myself, I'm assuming that to do so I just navigate to the relevant .lrcat file and just drag it to another spot like an external hard-drive or similar.
The only thing about that, and I often wonder about this, if you back-up a catalog that has an issue, then when you reopen that catalog or in my case delete Lightroom and re-install it, then open a backed up catalog that has an issue, then surely the issue will just still be there in the corrupted catalog.
It seems to me that continuing to back up catalogs that have an issue is not really much of a solution!


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