Today’s Question: I am getting the following message when I attempt to back up my Lightroom Classic catalog:
“Lightroom was unable to back up the catalog…”
I have tried backing up to other drives with the same result. The drive was not disconnected or ejected. I have permissions set correctly. Any suggestions?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Based on your description I suspect your catalog has become corrupted. I suggest importing the data from your existing catalog into a new catalog.
More Detail: While permission issues can certainly result in an inability to back up the catalog to a specific drive or folder, if that were the case you would likely have seen other issues with Lightroom Classic, depending on your storage configuration. Plus, it sounds like you’ve verified the permission issue through your operating system. Note, for example, that on Macintosh computers you’ll want to enable the “Full Disk Access” option for Lightroom Classic so it can access all storage.
Based on your description, I suspect the issue is a corrupted catalog, causing Lightroom Classic to have difficulty making a copy of the catalog as part of the backup process.
My suggestion is to create a new catalog (File > New Catalog from the menu in Lightroom Classic) and then import your existing catalog into the new catalog. To do so, with the new catalog open choose File > Import from Another Catalog from the menu. Navigate to the folder location and select the prior catalog for import. This will bring all of the information about your existing photos from the original catalog into the new catalog, which will hopefully fully resolve your issue.
The risk of catalog corruption over time is the key reason I recommend using the built-in feature to back up the Lightroom Classic catalog. As part of that process, I recommend turning on both checkboxes in the backup configuration dialog to enable both error-checking and optimization of the catalog, as the former in particular can help identify problems before they become serious.
