Lightroom Disaster..

[JohnC6]

I've spent half the day trying to sort my LR6. I'm only posting about it because of the way it was resolved. I'd Googled about why I was getting the spinning ball of death going from Library to Develop. It took a few minutes. AI popped up so I followed it's instructions . Go to Preferences > Performance > look down the page to the box marked 'camera raw cache settings' and click on the box' Purge Caches'. In the same box change 'Maximum size' from 5 to 20 or 30. I chose 30..It worked. I asked another question and was directed to where there were about 500 files..the light blue/dark blue LRC boxes. Lightroom Catalogues. I think AI described this section as a 'graveyard' taking up a lot of space. I followed instructions on how to clear them but in doing so lost my current LR6 catalogue. I can't possibly recall the maze of instructions I went through but the last instruction was to get the catalogues back out of the bin (Lr6 catalogue was not one of them)and place them back where they came from in the 'graveyard' as my LR6 catalogue could not be found and as it was there before trashing all those dead catalogues the only thing left to do was get everything back to where it all was. Whilst sending them all back LR had identified two that existed in the original place and asked if I wanted to 'replace' them or 'duplicate' them. AI said for safety, duplicate them. I clicked on that and the system went nuts. I'm guessing but it looked to me as though it was duplicating all 500. My screen was filled with catalogues,black lines, white lines,meshes, page after page behind each other..horrendous. I've never seen the screen like that and,of course, the spinning ball of death was..well..spinning. I could do nothing apart from shut down the iMac. To be certain of a clean break I pulled the cable out and left it for 30 minutes. When I restarted it all those catalogues had gone but I also saw that all my photos in folders LR3-4-6 had gone,too. The left side panel showed "number of folders..0." "number of photos 0 ". I did the only thing I could think of. Go to my external backup and open up the last backup catalogue which was two days ago for my Majorca photos and which was the current one. I thought I'd lost Lr3 and LR4 photos but would,at least have LR6. So I clicked on the last backup on the external drive and on screen came a message....and this is why I'm posting about it. It read "launch this catalogue...a bunch of numbers showed..and went on.."by doing this all AI actions will be reversed" I could hardly believe it. I clicked 'launch' and held my breath. All my folders and photos came back. It was "as you were".

Here's my question. How on earth did Lightroom or the iMac know AI had been giving me instructions ? Thinking about it, I suppose the iMac would know.