Messed up catalog directory structure and slow backups

[Longball Willie]

Hello, I am a Lightroom CC user. I have been using Lightroom since it first came out and have always found it complicated. Now, after so many years I am committed to it and am afraid to go anywhere else. I have only one catalog. (All the Lightroom Pros advise against having multiple catalogs). The size of this catalog is 20 Gig +/-. I have had painfully slow backups (around 20 min.) and decided to do some research on my catalog and it's location. First off let me preface that I upgraded my machine with a new SSD boot drive. I don't know if this had anything to do with my catalog location when I installed Lightroom from Creative Cloud. Here is an explanation of where Lightroom says my catalog is located and the massive duplication of files and backup folder issues.

When I go to Catalog>Settings> and check the location of my catalog It takes me to users>me>pictures>Catalog Name>Backups. BACKUPS! (where did that come from?) So confusing. I think somehow my directory structure got messed up. The size of the catalog folder is 21 Gig. Within the catalog folder are some files and a folder named backups. The "backups" folder is where Lightroom takes me to find my catalog. Within this folder is named a backup also. I wish someone could help me straighten this out and start fresh with where the files should be located. Any help would be appreciated.

[dj_paige]

The size of this catalog is 20 Gig +/-. I have had painfully slow backups (around 20 min.) and decided to do some research on my catalog and it's location.

That's a pretty big catalog, are you sure that is the size of the .lrcat file? How much free space do you have on the drive with the catalog and on the drive where the backups go?

When I go to Catalog>Settings> and check the location of my catalog It takes me to users>me>pictures>Catalog Name>Backups. BACKUPS! (where did that come from?)

It comes from the fact that you have been making backups. These backups MUST be on a different drive than the original catalog. This is not optional, they MUST go on a different drive than the originals. Are they on a different drive? If they are on the same drive, I would move the backups to a different drive, and change the location of where the backups go.

The "backups" folder is where Lightroom takes me to find my catalog. Within this folder is named a backup also. I wish someone could help me straighten this out and start fresh with where the files should be located.

Sounds to me like you (accidentally?) opened a backup catalog, which you shouldn't do unless the original catalog file is no longer usable. You want to find the original catalog and only work with that ... but if you have been opening a backup, working with the original will cause you to lose some work that was done in the backup. There are ways to extract work done in one catalog and merge that into another catalog, but first you have to straighten all this out.

[Longball Willie]

Complicated question and a through (but still complicated) answer. I kinda follow you on accidentally opened a backup catalog. It wouldn't surprise me if i did this at some point. Do you know if Adobe has a paid support option where I could share my screen with a tec and possibly work through this. Believe it or not, this is a major goal of mine in 2017.

[dj_paige]

I doubt that Adobe tech support will help resolve this type of situation.

Perhaps you could show us screen capture(s) of your operating system folders, to illustrate what you are seeing.