Posted by Kalin Wilson on September 15, 2007 at 1:53 AM
If anyone ever has a problem with their lightroom database complaining that it is corrupt and can be backed up, here is a tip:
Contact Dan Tull (dantull at gmail dot com). He may be able to repair it.
After restoring my database from my backup drive (following my RAID-1 failure), I kept getting warning from LR that my database file was corrupt. I could still use/edit the images. Everything seemed fine but it felt like a timebomb, so I started planning to export/copy what I could and build a new database. Then I came across some posts on the Adobe forums from others with the same issue. Dan is a quality engineer with Adobe and thought that these databases could be repairable. People began sending their files to him. So I zipped and sent him my DB file last night. This morning I had a repaired file! Muchas Gracias!
Hopefully none of you have any problems. But unexpected shutdowns/crashes while the LR DB is open can lead to integrity problems. As with anything, backup often.
Posted by Paul Wegemann on September 15, 2007 at 9:31 AM
Thanks for the tip, Kalin. My LR database is getting big and I've had nightmares about re-doing a lot of work if I ever had to rebuild.
Posted by Scott Bacon on September 15, 2007 at 9:35 AM
Cool. Great tip and happy to hear he got your's fixed up!!
Posted by Paul Beiser on September 15, 2007 at 9:36 AM
Thanks very much Kalin, for taking the time to post this here!! Much appreciated.
Posted by Nat Coalson on September 15, 2007 at 9:48 AM
Thanks for posting this, Kalin!
It's a good idea to periodically test/repair your DB on starting LR and to optimize it regularly (from the Catalog Settings menu). This can help deter (or at least defer) any problems with the DB. Optimization does a typical compact/repair database operation.
And make sure to back up your database frequently!
Also - since the database is open source (SQLite) it can be repaired using a standard SQLite database browser. (On OS X I use SQLite Database Browser 1.3.... there are several others available.)
For the techies out there, you might be very interested to open the LR DB in a SQLite browser, you can see the entire data architecture - table structures, queries etc. If you're comfortable working with databases, the LR database will not be daunting at all.
Discussion
4 repliesContact Dan Tull (dantull at gmail dot com). He may be able to repair it.
After restoring my database from my backup drive (following my RAID-1 failure), I kept getting warning from LR that my database file was corrupt. I could still use/edit the images. Everything seemed fine but it felt like a timebomb, so I started planning to export/copy what I could and build a new database. Then I came across some posts on the Adobe forums from others with the same issue. Dan is a quality engineer with Adobe and thought that these databases could be repairable. People began sending their files to him. So I zipped and sent him my DB file last night. This morning I had a repaired file! Muchas Gracias!
Hopefully none of you have any problems. But unexpected shutdowns/crashes while the LR DB is open can lead to integrity problems. As with anything, backup often.
It's a good idea to periodically test/repair your DB on starting LR and to optimize it regularly (from the Catalog Settings menu). This can help deter (or at least defer) any problems with the DB. Optimization does a typical compact/repair database operation.
And make sure to back up your database frequently!
Also - since the database is open source (SQLite) it can be repaired using a standard SQLite database browser. (On OS X I use SQLite Database Browser 1.3.... there are several others available.)
For the techies out there, you might be very interested to open the LR DB in a SQLite browser, you can see the entire data architecture - table structures, queries etc. If you're comfortable working with databases, the LR database will not be daunting at all.
Just be careful