# Delete All Data and duplicate catalog



## Stacy (Mar 18, 2016)

Hi All -
I hope you are doing well.  I had this message come up when trying to sync from my desktop to the web for Creative Cloud from Lightroom:

"This apears to be a duplicate or automatically created backup of your catalog.  As it many not be current,  sync has been disabled for this catalog.  Please open yourproduction catalog to resume sync.

To make this your sync catalog delete all data to start fresh. "

  I have tried looking up forums, and couldn't find anything about this message.  I typically upload my photos onto the web for Lightroom CC and then have them sync to my desktop, and then as I edit continue to sync them so edited ones are also on the web (I hope that made sense).  Do I truly need to Delete All Data, and what does that mean?  Will I be losing all of my work on the 3000 photos from sessions I have already gone through and edited?  Any help or insight would be appreciated as "Delete All Data" sounds pretty scary. Is there a way to fix the catalog issue?  My computer did some automatic updates the other day, and I think that is why I have a "duplicate catalog" but I am not sure on that either.     Thank you in advance!


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## Linwood Ferguson (Mar 18, 2016)

I think the real question is how this came to be.

Here's a sort of situation it COULD come from: 

- Open catalog, sync
- Do stuff in catalog
- Close and backup (call this backup X)
- Open catalog
- Do stuff (call this stuff Z)
- Sync
- Close catalog 

- Open catalog backup X (and/or restore X to the regular location)
- Sync

This would be trying to sync an older copy which does not have "Z" work done in it.

So I think the question is whether something along these lines happened.   I would worry less, frankly, about the mobile sync as the catalog itself, unless you understand exactly how this came to be.


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## rufy93 (Mar 18, 2016)

I have had this issue a few times. Never bothered troubleshooting as I haven't received it for a while now. 

What you have to delete is the Lightroom mobile sync data, not the Lightroom catalogue data. 
After you have deleted all data you have to select then collections to sync to the cloud once again. 

Unfortunately you lose any changes made on your mobile devices which are not synced to your catalogue already.


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## Jim Wilde (Mar 18, 2016)

But don't do anything such as "Delete All Data" yet until we figure out what's happened. It sounds as though you've opened a backup catalog, whether by design or by accident. Opening your "proper" catalog should put things right, so with Lightroom open do File>Open Recent and take a screenshot of the result. Don't do anything else yet, simply post the screenshot for us to help try to figure out what's happened.


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## Stacy (Mar 18, 2016)

Thank you all for your insight.  I am on my Surface Pro, and I can't get it to take a screen shot of the File>Open Recent, but when I go to that option, this is the option that I get: Lightroom Catalog.lrcat

I have attached a snip of my Lightroom folder when Lightroom is open, in case that helps.  Thank you again for all of your help.


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## Stacy (Mar 18, 2016)

I tried making back-up yesterday once I started getting this message, and while I am in Lightroom, it will let me go back to that catalog, but not sure if that helps or solves the problem.  What do you think?  This is what I get when I click on the backup from yesterday, when I started getting this message.  It does not look like Lightroom backed up when the updates automatically shut my computer down, I only have other backups from Feb. and Jan.


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## Stacy (Mar 18, 2016)

Ok, got the screen shot.  Also put in a screen shot of the Catalog Preferences, not sure if that helps either.
Thank you again!


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## Jim Wilde (Mar 18, 2016)

OK, the screenshot doesn't show any other catalog has been used on that system, which is a mystery. Is the Surface Pro your normal Lightroom system, or do you use another system as well?


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## Stacy (Mar 18, 2016)

I have one other system on a different laptop but that is not connected to Lightroom cc.  It had the first version of Lightroom I bought as stand alone.  I rarely use that now that I have cc on my surface pro,  easier for editing while traveling.


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## Stacy (Mar 18, 2016)

I don't know if this helps, but the one in blue is the only one when searching .lrcat files that will automatically open Lightroom.  Maybe some of the "lock" ones need to be deleted or when I click on it says it needs to be fixed so it points to the right target?


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## Jim Wilde (Mar 18, 2016)

To be honest, it doesn't really help....in fact it confuses me even more! There are several things I don't understand:

1. Why you have a few lock files on the system. I wonder if that is something related to the fact you're using the Surface Pro, do you close down Lightroom before shutting down the Pro?

2. Why you had the initial problem related to syncing with Lightroom mobile....there's no evidence of you using a different catalog that I can see, so I'm a bit baffled about the initial message. It seems as though Lightroom doesn't recognise that this is the catalog that it was syncing.

Apart from the syncing issue, does the catalog appear normal and up-to-date? 

Unless someone else has any alternative suggestion, you might be forced into doing the "Delete All Data" to start over with the syncing. It's not quite as scary as it sounds, though it will obviously be a bit of a pain time-wise as you'll have to go through the sync again. What happens is that all the data that you have copied up to the Adobe servers (and then down to your iDevice) will be deleted, so you'll need to re-sync the collections again. The edits that you have done should be OK.


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## Stacy (Mar 22, 2016)

Hi Jim - I just wanted to thank you for all of your help and insight!  I have learned much about catalogs.  My desktop Lightroom and cloud started syncing on its own yesterday.  Not sure how, but am hoping it is ok now.  I appreciate the help, and at least now I know of some things to look for if this does happen again.  Thank you!


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## claire858 (Jun 16, 2016)

I had this same message come up today - I was in the middle of a mobile sync and then LR crashed.  I've "deleted all data" before - but that was before I had a lot of photos synced.  Gonna go for it again...


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## Gilles (Mar 8, 2017)

Hi,

I had this same message come up yesterday (Lr crashed on boot and then when it rebooted I got the message).

So... A few questions:
1) Is there any way to just tell Lr that this is indeed the ONLY catalog that I have?
2) Will shared collections on lightroom.adode.com remain? Or do I need to re-share all those again?
3) What's going to happen to the photos I've taken in Mobile Lr that have not downloaded yet?

Thanks in advance!
Gilles


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## Linwood Ferguson (Mar 8, 2017)

Gilles said:


> 1) Is there any way to just tell Lr that this is indeed the ONLY catalog that I have?



Lightroom doesn't maintain some catalog-of-catalogs.  A catalog exists as a file on your computer, so you can have one squirrelled away in a corner and never touch it, and Lightroom does not "know" about it, but it also (mostly) will not touch it unless you point Lightroom to it.

The "mostly" is that Lightroom does remember the last catalog accessed.  It also I think has a list of recently used ones but those require you to select from such a list, it is not automatic.

You can search for any files ending in lrcat (e.g. A.lrcat) and see if they exist on your computer to find any such that may be out there. 

I don't know if the mac, like windows, does you the "favor" of hiding file types, if so you need to turn that nasty feature off to see the lrcat type.


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## clee01l (Mar 8, 2017)

Gilles said:


> Hi,
> 
> I had this same message come up yesterday (Lr crashed on boot and then when it rebooted I got the message).
> 
> ...


Welcome to the forum. 
In Preferences on the  General tab, set the Default catalog to the specific catalog that you want to open each time you start LR.


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## Gilles (Mar 8, 2017)

Ferguson said:


> Lightroom doesn't maintain some catalog-of-catalogs.  A catalog exists as a file on your computer, so you can have one squirrelled away in a corner and never touch it, and Lightroom does not "know" about it, but it also (mostly) will not touch it unless you point Lightroom to it.
> 
> The "mostly" is that Lightroom does remember the last catalog accessed.  It also I think has a list of recently used ones but those require you to select from such a list, it is not automatic.
> 
> ...



Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I really meant was: "Can I tell Lightroom that THIS IS the catalog I want to sync, and it's not a backup or a copy".


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## JohnK7a (Apr 18, 2017)

Same question. "Can I tell Lightroom that THIS IS the catalog I want to sync, and it's not a backup or a copy?"  I upgraded to CC 2015.10 today (also had an unrelated Finder crash that may or may not have contributed to the problem) and Lr thinks I'm using a backup rather than the actual master catalog. There is a apparently a workaround for this on Windows, which is to delete the Sync.lrdata folder: lightroom catalog no longer syncs with mobile |Adobe Community  I see no similar folder on Mac (in any directory).

As a general comment, the pop-up messages, screens and help files provided by Lr and lightroom.adobe.com are not clearly worded (inconsistent and ambiguous wording) and it's not clear what exactly will happen when I "delete all data" "start fresh" and "restart". Lots of warnings, but no transparency about what will happen step-by-step and what the impact will be.


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## Gilles (Apr 18, 2017)

Here's what I ended up doing:

- I went through Mobile Lr to figure out what was synced and what was un-downloaded content. 
- I saved the un-downloaded back to Photos just to make sure I had a copy.
- Used the Lr "Delete All Data" button (Turns out this only seems to delete the "sync" data. All the photos were still on Mobile.)
- I created a new catalog and then connected that to Lr Mobile and I got a prompt to download everything. That made sure I a copy of everything.
- I then deleted everything from Lr Mobile (using the web functions) and synced the collections back up. 

I think I ended up losing some comments on the new photos but I didn't actually lose anything other than time in the end. And this reasserted the fact that this is not quite ready for "primetime" yet. It's still part of my workflow to get photos off my phone, but I have a lot less stuff stored up there.


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## JohnK7a (Apr 19, 2017)

Thanks Gilles. Very helpful and has also triggered some additional thought about using Lr Mobile going forward, or return to my pre-CC practice of using Dropbox. I'm still considering that. But I thought I'd explain what I did after reading your post:

I located the 168 photos taken since sync broke between the last CC sync to Lr Friday and the first photo taken on the phone Saturday morning. (This was definitely pre-upgrade to CC 2015.10, but perhaps I had a Finder crash late Friday or early Saturday). 
I plugged the iPhone into the MacBook using USB-Lightning sync cable and used Image Capture on the Mac to bring the photos to an import folder that I'll process later. 
I deleted all photos from CC (lightroom.adobe.com) and restarted Lr and LrM. At that point nothing was in CC and shortly thereafter nothing was in LrM (but all still in Camera Roll). This is the "start fresh" referenced in the Delete All Files dialog box. 
I enabled sync on one of my originally synced collections and after a few minutes the collection and photos appeared in CC and on LrM. It seems that the list of which collections are synced is stored in CC rather than the Lr catalog.
At this point, LrM had only the explicitly-synced collection. The All Synced Photographs default collection is really a reflection of what is in CC, so it's now empty except for this just-synced collection.
On LrM I added one of the early photos, that had already synced properly last Thursday. It appeared in CC and then in my Thursday folder in Lr. Since it was already there, presumably the file on disk was overwritten with an identical one (including same timestamp). But in the catalog, instead of the originally synced file there was now a stack. I unstacked them and removed the virtual copy. I'm very glad that I did not re-add the entire Camera Roll to LrM. 6700 syncs later I would have 6700 stacks/virtual copies. 
If there is anything from the past that I want to see in LrM, I can of course put them it into a new Collection and let them sync to CC and onward to LrM. Given that LrM does not support keywords, and that background sync does not work with iPhone, my workflow remains on the Mac. 
Thanks again.

PS: Adobe, the CC sync process is too fragile, too quirky, too limited, and very much unclear (including wording in dialog boxes and help pages). Contact me if you want more thoughts on that. I've now spent 6 hours or so for an unsatisfactory outcome, though with no lost data. The root cause of the issue is still unknown. Could be a sync bug or an issue with my Mac (an unexpected Finder restart MIGHT have occurred during that time) that confused the sync process (though it should not have).


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## Victoria Bampton (Apr 19, 2017)

JohnK7a said:


> There is a apparently a workaround for this on Windows, which is to delete the Sync.lrdata folder: lightroom catalog no longer syncs with mobile |Adobe Community  I see no similar folder on Mac (in any directory).



If you wanted to try that on Mac, it's Mac HD/[your username]/Library/Caches/Adobe/Lightroom/Sync Data/Sync.lrdata.

It's basically an offline store of cloud information, so when you trash it, Lightroom downloads the cloud metadata again and checks it against the catalog contents.


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## JohnK7a (Apr 19, 2017)

Thanks Victoria. I didn't find this file fishing around, and Spotlight didn't find it (apparently it doesn't search everywhere even with "other" checked). Given your hint, I found that the following command in a Terminal window would find it.

find ~ -iname Sync.lrdata

Unable to work, and leery of tricking Lr into believing there was no problem, last night I went ahead and cleared CC. I then re-enabled sync for the collections and re-added items to Lr Mobile that had previously synced but never made it to Lr. The side effect is that All Synced Photographs is basically empty (except re-added collections) vs. the 6700 photos there before. 

Based on your description, it probably would have been safe to remove that folder. This might be a useful technique should someone ever have to switch to a catalog backup to recover from some catastrophic catalog error.

Thanks again. Also thanks for the great resources on your website!


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