Cannot export as catalog to external drive

[tracys66364935]

I export each year's photos as a catalog to several external drives to make space on my hard drive.  I got a year behind so I am doing 2015 & 2016 now.  The other day I exported 2015 and it seemed to work fine.  Now I am trying to export 2016 and LR won't create a catalog.  It did copy all the photos and folders to the external drive.

I tried to create the catalog and got an error message saying that "Lightroom cannot create a catalog named "2016t" on volume "Volumes/Photobackups by year/2016/2016t" because Lightroom cannot save changes to this location.  Lightroom Catalogs can not be opened on network volumes, removeable storage or read only volumes."

I tried to open previous years' catalogs and got an error message stating that LR had encountered an unknown error.

I am using LR 4 (no update available) on an iMac.  It is a WD external drive.  Lots of room on both hard drive and external drive.  Any ideas of what I can do to fix this?

[Just Shoot Me · Accepted solution]

I suspect the drive is failing or the write permissions have changed on the drive.

[Just Shoot Me]

Also exactly how is the drive formatted and what exact version of OS X are you using?

[tracys66364935]

OS X Yosemite 10.10.5

I don't remember exactly how I formatted the drive but it was formatted by this computer and I wouldn't have tried to get fancy.  I do have another one that I duplicate this on.  I could try it tomorrow to see if everything works normally on it.

Thank you for your help.

[Laura Shoe]

I know this won't resolve your issue, Tracy, and I don't have any more to add on that issue, but on another topic, have you considered leaving all years  in your one master catalog, and just move the photos to an external drive?  In one  catalog Lightroom can manage photos that reside on many different hard drives. This way you still have access to them all. As you have seen, having each year of photos in a different catalog makes it very difficult to pull together subsets of photos that span years (such as all 5-star photos).

[tracys66364935]

Thank you for your help on this.  I'm really not sure what happened, because it seemed like the things I tried didn't do anything, but I walked away from it for a while and now it works normally.  I don't trust that drive, but as it is not my only backup I am going to continue to use it for now.