Observations on catalogue/backup issues

A copy of an email that I have just sent to Support.

"Some observations on database/backup corruption issues when running on latest update to Mojave on iMac.

I have not had any problems with Luminar 3.0.2 losing images and edits until today when some of my photos went missing from the catalogue. I tried to reload Luminar and access backup but it kept crashing.

Yesterday I was exploring accessing Luminar from Lightroom via "Edit In" to take Lightroom development over into Luminar for stylising. Even if there is an instance of Luminar already running this process starts up another instance so that there are two copies of Luminar running using the same catalogue. Could having more than one copy of Luminar modifying the database lead to corruption in it and/or backups? On startup does Luminar do any cross checking between latest backup and catalogue database that might trigger an updating of the image gallery with incorrect data leading to photos being deleted from the database?

I renamed the backups folder in the Luminar catalogue and tried restarting Luminar again, this time it came up and photos had reappeared in the catalogue.

The original backups folder had a lot of recent entries which were just the backup files without the corresponding plist file. I deleted all the entries back until yesterday afternoon, renamed the backup folders so that the modified original was put back in place. After doing this Luminar loaded normally but some photos were still missing.

I did another reload of Luminar holding down option key to give list of backups and restored from a backup from early on yesterday. This restored the missing photos to the catalogue.

As an additional safeguard against future problems I took a manual backup of my catalogue and restored that as a test. While all the photos appeared one of my albums was empty, despite the original photos still being in their folders and accessible that way.

I repeated the backup/restore of the original catalogue and this time the album was correctly populated.

From these experiences it looks as though
- running multiple copies of Luminar at the same time may lead to database/backup corruption
- Edit-in from Lightroom will start a new copy of Luminar even if there is one running, so if using this best to ensure that no copies of Luminar are running when using Lightroom
- Can recover from some Luminar start-up crashes by deleting renaming the Backups folder within the Luminar catalogue folder, this may leave catalogue in usable state.
- Deleting recent entries from Backups folder may allow Luminar to be loaded with Option key held down allowing a restore from a backup prior to database corruption.
- Manual backup/restore process is not in itself reliable.

I am not sure that I can supply you with copies of catalogues etc as, even when they are compressed, they are large and my Internet upload speed is so slow that uploading would take an excessive time, but I am willing to try things out if that would help resolve the catalogue instability issues."

Angela Andrieux

March 08, 2019 00:33

Hi David,

Thank you for your thorough report and for also sending the above message to our support team. One of our techs will be in touch with you as soon as possible.

Tony Collins

March 08, 2019 12:44
Edited

Doesn't "edit in" from LR put L3 into standalone mode. IE Not accessing the catalog?

Certainly for me - even when L3 can't start due to catalog corruption, I can still "Edit in" from LR which suggests the instance opened from LR doesn't attempt to use the corrupted catalog.

David Tillett

March 09, 2019 23:42

Hi Tony,

Yes, accessing Luminar from Lightroom does restrict its functionality, no catalogue access, not able to call plugins etc. However, it is still the same program that is being called, presumably with a flag saying run in restricted mode - normal Looks and Workspaces are available.

I have never had any catalogue problems before and when I started losing files I looked at what I might have done differently that triggered the corruption. Having both normal and standalone instances of same Luminar application running together was the main thing I could think of.

While using Luminar from Lightroom should be self contained the fact that I hit the corruption after running the two processes at the same time made me wonder if there is a bug in the self contained version that allowed it to interact with the active catalogue from the other activation. Since there has been no news from Skylum as to whether or not they have identified the reason why files start to go missing from the catalogue I felt that it was worth reporting this observation in case it gave them something to look into, and alerting others to avoid running a full activation of Luminar alongside accessing it from Luminar in case this is a trigger for the corruption.

I have just clarified with support that I meant two copies of the same installation of Luminar running at the same time, not having two copies of Luminar installed at the same time, and now await a response to my report.

Observations on catalogue/backup issues

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