Complete loss of Catalog Content
Dear all,
Been using C1 for years. Not the first time i'm losing important work, and losing 100's of hours to recover my work. Now questionning if i will continue using C1.
The issues is simple : at reopening my Master Catalog, it shows only 723 pictures, while yesterday it was around 90 000 pictures in it ! The pictures are still on my external hard drive, in untouched folders, Catalog haven't been renamed...Same happend last week. That time only 7 000 were remaining. I did the verification and repairs process, nothing is resolved. Folder on my drive are showing, same for Albums, but count is at 0, same for recent imports they are empty even though i made a lot in the last couple of days... I took over to rebuilt manually my library, resynching folders one by one to avoid C1 from crashing. It took a full week of launching imports, folder per folder, around the clock 24h for 1 week....I Finished to rebuilding my catalog YESTERDAY. Then reopening it today with only 723 pictures in it ? Didn't even had time to do a new backup from all the work i've done in the past week...
I've also tried all the options mentionned in the link below on how to recover a corrupt catalog (verify, repair, copy of cocatalog.db, reimporting within a new catalog, etc.). So far nothing worked.
Anyone had the same issue ? How to resolve this ? And how come it is a recurring issue for me ? Anything i'm not doing properly ?
Thank you !!
Vincent
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Is your Mac automatically moving files to the Cloud?
I've noticed with Sessions that sometimes C1 takes a long to show all the images.0 -
No, no automatic moving to cloud
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No recent backup
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One thing comes to mind with your situation. Usually, a corrupt catalog will not open. If you look at the contents of the catalog package, is the database file there? Does anything different happen if you open it? Are your projects and albums still there? Last, are you sure you haven't set a filter.
I agree with John Friend about backups. This is not going to help you until you figure a way to retrieve your catalog, but it might encourage others to have a risk mitigation plan. It takes about half the time to backup as it does to open the catalog. For those who want to avoid rebuilding previews when recovering a catalog, there are apps that will quickly synchronize your raw images and catalog file with one on an external drive so that you have a complete backup version of the raw files and catalog, including previews. I am very insecure about data loss, so I have 5 external HD or SSD backups in different locations. It really isn't too hard or time consuming to do this.
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Did you contact support?
Where did you / do you edit your images, in the C1 catalog or in sessions?
If you did your metadata work and image adjustments in sessions then they are still there and you can import your images into one or more new catalogs including the adjustments, but everything you did in the catalog will be lost, if the issue cannot be resolved.
Singing the same song as the others, the following does not help in your situation, but maybe going forward.
For that exact reason (catalog might be failing) I do all my edits in a session. I then import the images in my catalog. Strict separation of duties, session for editing, catalog for searching.
When I later want to edit the images further, I do it right in my session (or sessions if you like), then I remove the images from my catalog and sync the concerned folders again.
If I don't know where my images are which I want to edit, or they are distributed over many different folders (e.g. I want to find all images of a specific person from the last decade and edit a subset of them), then I search the images in the catalog, temporarily assign them to an album, then open them in one dummy session (via drag&drop to the open session), and do my edits there. When finished editing I remove the images from the catalog (I still know which ones because they are assigned to that album in the catalog) and re-sync the topmost folder of the images to get them back into catalog.
The idea is to have all metadata and adjustment settings in the image .cos and comask files. I consider this as much safer than having to rely on a catalog file.
For this I need to edit the images in a session (because C1 does not support storing these files when in catalog mode, unlike darktable for example. I once did a feature request to sync to such files but not much interest, not even much in the community here).
But I also want to search over all images, hence I need a catalog. I use the catalog only for searching and maybe exporting but never for metadata work or editing.If the catalog corrupts and cannot be restored, I have my work saved in thousands of small files on disk in subfolders of my images (the .cos and .comask files under the "CaptureOne" folder) and can import the images into a new C1 catalog, or any other catalog software if that's what I want to do. (but the drag&drop to a C1 session from external catalog apps does not work in all cases)
I did not have this setup from the start, I also edited images in my catalog. To get to this setup I needed to export all my orignal images from my catalog to the file system with the option "including adjustments", image folder by image folder, to have the latest .cos and comask files created, and move the created "CaptureOne" folders manually into my image folder hierarchy.
Export originals only works for certain files types (e.g.. not for videos) so you cannot rely on export originals to catch all originals, hence I used only the "CaptureOne" folders created on export which I then moved into the respective places in my original image folder hierarchy.And yes, backups are your friend.
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I'm not sure this will help, but here is my experience. As a Windows user of v21 and then v23 (skipped v22) I got well over 50 Verify Failed occurrences over a fifteen month period, on two different laptops (one Intel, one AMD) so I concluded it had to be C1 at fault. Most times a single repair repaired, but on some occasions I had to repair twice to get it working again. Customer Support failed to support or resolve and finally disowned the matter. In the meantime I had gone through the balls-aching process of moving from Catalog to Session and that is where I now am. I will not risk a catalogue again. I have since moved on to Apple and a Macbook Pro M1. The creation of an Apple Session was easy - just create a blank and start navigating around folders. I did create a Catalog from the session cos, comask etc files and on third or fourth use, ran a Verify and it failed. So, even on a Mac I am continuing to use Sessions and nothing will persuade me back to Catalogues.
My advice is repair and repair. It sounds like you did not avail yourself of CO's automatic backup nags so a solution does not lie in that area. If you do sync manually, once you get then I would strongly recommend moving to sessions. The Session Database is almost entirely superfluous and only a hard drive failure will endanger your settings. If you do lose settings files (cos, comask etc) then you are likely to lose only some, not all.
BeO's advice looks complex on first reading but read it again and understand it as it contains good advice. Drag-and-drop no longer works under Windows (unless it is re-introduced in a future version) but it does still work for the Mac version. This makes a serious case for splitting DAM and Adjustments and selecting a DAM that suits your needs. I have created an Album called Collection and when it was established on Mac I used the free XnViewMP to show all files in grouped sub-folders (to make the next stage manageable), selected All then dragged them to Collection. By doing this in stages, where no stage contained more than 10K images, this populated Collection. Now, as I add new image folders it is a simple matter to add them to Collection from within CO. I also use XnViweMP to create keywords and use it to search then drag-and-drop to an Album when I want to adjust a like group. All this dragging does not move files but simply creates a look-up link in the target album.
Sessions do not offer an automatic backup nag so you need to cover that yourself. In Mac - did you enable the Mac timeshift (backup) feature?
Clive
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Hi Clive,
Interesting, it seems you have very similar thoughts, and do very similar things with XnViewMP where I use a C1 catalog.
Yes, I am not always good in explaining simple things, but indeed, once understood and practiced it is rather easy to do, one need discipline though not to edit in the C1 catalog, easy to forget sometimes if both the catalog and session is C1.
I am still with v22 (15.2) on Windows. Drag&drop to a session album still works.
I tested digikam as a catalog and it works quite good, drag&drop to C1 is supported. UI is not as nice though.
Pairing raw + jpg works too, so an export from C1 session e.g. with the quickproof recipe (which exports the C1 preview as a jpg, lightening fast) can be a way to show the edited jpg as a representative of the raw+jpg pair in digikam, and the jpg contains the metadata/keywords edited in C1 to find the pairs in digikam. No need for xmp file syncing then.
But you need to drag the raw from digikam to a C1 session album which requires a fiddly workaround in digikam to get from a searched set of jpg+raw pairs to a set of raws. I forgot howto but it worked.
I can imagine digikam as my new catalog system, should I need to abandon my C1 catalog but still keep my C1 session for editing.
I tested 16.2.3, drag&drop to a session album still works from a C1 catalog but no longer from an external app. I reported this regression defect two months ago. So this might be a showstopper for either using a 3rd party catalog, or for upgrading to C1 higher than v22 (on Windows).
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BeO - not criticizing your post or style. Just noting that the process needs to be clearly understood before implementing.
To be clear on drag-and-drop: v23 Windows continues to work from catalog to session but not from external apps I have tried and which previously worked (DxO, Windows Explorer, XnViewMP). These all worked in v21. I didn't own v22 so can't comment. On a Mac, it work fine in v23 from those apps (albeit Finder not Explorer).
I also reported it to CO and quick as a flash ... well, you know the rest.
Clive
Afterthought - a lot of users seem to have spent what to me is a lot in buying Photomechanic. Does that still work (in Windows) or are they also abandoned?
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I didn't read it as a critique.
Yes, I know the rest. Support replied and we had a few back and forth but since then, silence. Probably not high on their list. Maybe they fixed it in the later builds of v23 and just forgot to tell you and me, but I have doubts.
My guess is that the action for the drop event has not been adjusted to cope with the v23 enhancement that individual image variants (instead of image files with all their variants) can now be assigned to albums. Maybe they forgot it because they did not remember that drag&drop on Windows worked too, not just on Mac, at least if the drop target is an album.
Cheers
Regarding PM, good question. I didn't like it too much, but I don't have high metadata requirements.
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> Clive Buckley: ...Photomechanic. Does that still work (in Windows) or are they also abandoned?
Photo Mechanic is NOT abandoned. Current build released October 12th. They have a real support forum (in contrast that to C1). Developers answer questions, offer phone support or remote session support if forum ping-pong seems uneficcient. They do not hide their mail address nor their phone number.
I have used PM (on Windows) for so long that I do not see the UI issues BeO and other members refer to, I find it to be very efficient as my front end and back end. Liking a UI or not, may come down to habits and applications used previously. PM has many features, it may take time to learn and master.
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Hi OddS,
I didn't and wouldn't call it UI "issues", it is rather personal preference, as you said.
When travelling, I do most of my metadata edits on a 13 inch monitor and cannot stand these old-fashioned, gigantic (and even modal?) dialog windows on this small monitor. Take this with a grain of salt, it is totally possible that I don't remember correctly.
Out of habit and probably lack of mastering PM+ during the test phase I still find the handling of the keyword tool in C1 superior, for my rather low keyword requirements, and syncing keywords from C1 to PM via xmp did not work correctly when hierarchical keywords are used. PM developer reacted in the forum but no solution was provided nor announced, so it is a pricey software as well but old-fashioned, and with a slow development pace too.
I fully understand though that it was and is the king of metadata coverage and I have heard it is good for culling too, I never got to this point though as I am more than satisfied with C1 culling in browser/viewer (not even talking about the new culling view)
I think the point from Clive, but at least from me, is about the drag&drop function from PM to a C1 album with the C1 Windows version, which of course you don't have to use but I could not live without it. It is broken in C1 v23.
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OddS,
My reference to 'abandoned' was not whether the app has been abandoned (I know that it hasn't) but whether CO has abandoned support for it. You see - Windows apps used to drag-and-drop into a session and they don't now do that but they still do it under Mac. So CO has abandoned support for that feature under Windows. So ... either it does not work for Photomechanic Windows (in which case people have spent money and lost functionality) or it does (in which case why for that one alone and not for any of the others, including Windows Explorer).
Clive
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> Clive Buckley: ... Windows apps used to drag-and-drop into a session
Ah, Ok. I never used that much myself, and I abandoned C1 at v20. It is no longer practical for me to test. From the top of my head I wonder if I started C1, opened the session, switched to the other app, dragged to the C1 "in background" button on the task bar, then held and waited until Windows promoted C1 to the foreground and dropped in the C1 window. I only did that a handful of times, and likely never from PM. Drag to C1 did not fit my workflow. I used C1 in session mode and had PM ingest/copy/move images to the session's Capture folder, I did not use C1 import.
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