LR cannot use catalog - not writable & can't be opened

sapphire73

Just encountered this problem today. When I wen to open LR3 it said that lightroom cannot use the catalog because it is not writable and cannot be opened. I am using a macbook pro with OS X 10.5.8 and LR3 (version 3.4.1). I have 2 external hard drives and had been using one of these for the LR3 catalog backups, but it looks like a recent back up may have been written to the macbook pro hard drive.

Since I have very little free memory available just now on the macbook pro hard drive, I thought it might help to clean that up a bit by using Cocktail. But I hesitate to take a step that I may regret and would welcome input on the best way to problem-solve this.

Thanks,
Gretchen

sapphire73

I finally opened a backup of the catalog that is not as recent as I would have liked, but at least I have access to the bulk of the catalog. It may be time to get a new macbook so that it is easier to run LR backups and time machine in the future, but I would still be curious as to why this happened in the first place. I'll keep poking around on the adobe forums....

CatOne

sapphire73 wrote: »

Just encountered this problem today. When I wen to open LR3 it said that lightroom cannot use the catalog because it is not writable and cannot be opened. I am using a macbook pro with OS X 10.5.8 and LR3 (version 3.4.1). I have 2 external hard drives and had been using one of these for the LR3 catalog backups, but it looks like a recent back up may have been written to the macbook pro hard drive.

Since I have very little free memory available just now on the macbook pro hard drive, I thought it might help to clean that up a bit by using Cocktail. But I hesitate to take a step that I may regret and would welcome input on the best way to problem-solve this.

Thanks,
Gretchen

How much is "very little [memory] available?" If you have less than about 10% of the space free, you're in dangerous territory. Laptops use an amount of space on the disk equal to the RAM in the machine, and actually can use double that or more in many cases, and if your disk fills up it can result in data loss situations, FWIW.

sapphire73

Thank you for your response, CatOne. I now have 25% of the space free and managed to locate a more recent LR3 back up on an external hard drive, so problem solved for now. Phew!

For anyone else who might be thinking it is time to do some clean up, I found disk inventory helpful in finding what I could delete....