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Repair of corrupt catalog/database file - how long ?

Simon Knight
Hi,

My principle catalog file of 79,000 images is corrupt. I have run verify and am now running the repair utility. I have also read KB 2340 which suggests various options.

The repair process has been running for several hours and the only feedback is a pane that reports "Transfer in progress" approximately every second. I calculate that if this message is being applied to each image that the process is going to take twenty two hours to complete.

Should I let it run its course or would I be better reverting to a back-up made in time machine ?

Simon
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Comments

9 comments

Date Votes
  • Eric Valk
    I think you will not lose anything by letting the repair run to completion, even if it takes 30 hours.

    If the repair fails or is still damaged you can still restore from Time Machine or from Capture One's catalog backup.
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  • Permanently deleted user
    I had a similar problem some time ago where repairing a corrupt database took inordinately long. I think I let it run for over a week before I contacted support. I had the catalog and referenced images on an external disk. Support suggested I stop the repair, temporarily relocate the catalog to my internal drive, and try the repair again. This time, the repair completed successfully in a few hours. Support said I could move the catalog back to the external after the repair was complete which I did and have not had any problems since.
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  • Simon Knight
    Thanks for your replies. I'm afraid that I don't have the patience to wait thirty hours let alone a week especially when the feed back is so cryptic. In my case the corruption occurred during image import and I had a Time Machine backup from minutes before the corrupting image import so I decided to restore from Time Machine.

    The restore was not that simple as my internal SSD drive is not large enough to hold two copies of the database. I chose a convoluted method :

    Time Machine driver (USB2) -> External USB3 drive - eight and half hours for the 104 Gbytes of data.

    Duplicate the catalog on the USB3 drive for testing - three hours.

    Copy the catalog from the USB3 drive back to the internal SSD once happy - twenty minutes.

    In the short term i shall be using Carbon Copy Cloner to maintain my own backups of the catalog on the USB 3 drive. In the long term I shall add a USB three drive as my Time Machine drive.

    I shall also experiment to see if it is necessary to restore the cache as I note that Capture One only backs up a dot catalogdb file to the library when asked to.

    best wishes

    Simon
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  • Eric Valk
    In the past I have restored Capture One catalogs by only replacing the database file.

    Typically caches are used for temporary results and can be deleted without any issue.
    IMO When making significant changes, it is often better to delete the cache, as the the data in the cache are interim results based on the data set you had. If you have significantly changed the data set, the interim results are no longer entirely consistent with the new data set.
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  • Permanently deleted user
    Hi,

    The cache contains all the previews, but they can be regenerated at will. So, don't worry.
    Robert
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  • Jerry C
    Takes a matter of minutes to replace the corrupt cocatalogdb (database) file with your latest backup cocatalogdb file in the cocatalog package. The other files in the package are likely just fine. I have never found it necessary or useful on the 2 or 3 times I managed to corrupt the database to run the repair process. Of course, you need to mato frequent backups to use this process.

    Jerry C
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  • Simon Knight
    Thanks all for your advice. It is unfortunate that it is so simple to corrupt the catalog file. I used to test software and write databases and am attempting to understand how the Capture One database has been designed. It has the feel of software that is not fully tested and that fails to report errors back to the user.

    Simon
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  • Permanently deleted user
    Hi Simon,

    My problem was that some images didn't appear in the folder library, albeit they did in smart albums, for instance.
    So, as suugested by Phase One, I had to create a new catalog and import the old one. I am not sure it was what we could call a corrupted catalog. But Phase One was very helpful and reactive.
    But sure that the Capture One catalog could be improved !!
    Robert
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  • Eric Valk
    [quote="Skids" wrote:
    Thanks all for your advice. It is unfortunate that it is so simple to corrupt the catalog file. I used to test software and write databases and am attempting to understand how the Capture One database has been designed. It has the feel of software that is not fully tested and that fails to report errors back to the user.

    Simon

    I agree. A pattern that I have noticed is that some times Capture One gets into a mode where it uses more and more RAM, eventually it crashes itself or the OS or the user just can’t wait any longer. This is when database corruption occurs. Presumably some database change was ongoing and only partially completed.

    It’s as if it cannot recover from, and sometimes cannot detect, an incomplete database change.

    The most vulnerable time seems to be during a very large import.

    In my previous iMac I had 16GB of RAM and had this kind of problem occasionally. In my current Mac I have 24GB of RAM and have not experienced this problem. But I haven’t done any really really big imports with the newer Mac.
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