Lightroom 1.1 crash/making timely backups?

Question

Today I was minding my own business working in my newly upgraded version of LR 1.1 when suddenly with no warning my computer crashed. No indication that anything was wrong, just suddenly a blink and a black screen. I was running no other apps at the time, and no other device that was attached either to the same surge protector or the same outlet was affected, all of which makes me suspect that LR was somehow the source of the crash. This is especially so because I did some routine computer maintenance as recently as the day before yesterday (repaired permissions and ran disk warrior to rebuild the drive). The only thing that's been doing strange things is LR (as some of you know from recent postings on various forums...).
Some background: I am running a dual 2 GHz G5 PowerPC with 3.5 GB of RAM, on system OS10.4.10. I was working in a LR folder with about 6000+ images in it at the time of the crash.
After the crash I went to restart my computer and also LR, and LR gave me a dialog box that said my catalog was corrupted and couldn't be used. I filed a bug report with Adobe and got a helpful note from a Lightroom QE fellow (not sure what QE stands for) with whom I'm corresponding. I'm hoping they can help me repair the catalog, but no word on that yet. The same dialog box said that if I'd made a recent backup I could move it into the LR folder. The last time I closed LR (and hence made an automatic backup) was very late last night. This means that if I go forward and use the backup, all my work today (about 6 hours worth of work) will be lost. For the time being I have moved the backup into place, but am waiting to hear about the repair before I keep going with working on any new material. And of course, I am on a deadline for the project that is effected by all this (aarrrrgggh).
I was wondering if anyone out there has experienced this kind of thing and what you did at this point? Also, how does one go about periodically backing up LR without shutting the program down altogether (a rather disruptive and inconvenient option)? I feel like I should be backing up at least every half hour (I don't want to risk losing more work that that), and didn't realize my work would not be backed up automatically in a situation like this.
I recently undertook a major software and workflow upgrade, and almost didn't go the LR route because I was afraid that LR at version 1.0 was not that stable, nor did it have the DAM features fully developed (the other option would have been ImageIngester Pro/Bridge/iView a la Peter Krogh's system). I decided to go with LR anyway because I felt the DAM issues would be addressed soon, and since I don't have a real DAM system up and running yet anyway, it wouldn't hurt me to wait to start on that. I also chose LR because I am concerned about the future of iView in the hands of the new Microsoft owners. To get LR up and running I bought the D-65 LR workflow download and also used the Chris Orwig tutorials on Lynda.com.
Now I'm beginning to regret my choice because of the stability issues, and it sucks that I might end up losing most of a day's work when I'm on a deadline because LR might have pushed my computer hard enough to elicit a latent hardware failure (this was the suggestion of the Lightroom QE, which seems like a real possibility).
Any feedback, comments or insights on this would be most welcome. This has been a most frustrating week with regards to technology. All I want to do is sit down and do my work, but I seem to be running into glitch after glitch.
Best,
Paula Lerner
Afghanistan Radio Interview:
http://tinyurl.com/35uf5g
http://www.lernerphoto.com
Paula Lerner Photography * Boston * 617-489-6747
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Answer 1

Jeff and others:
Many thanks for the feedback, its much appreciated.
Jeff, I understand why you and others say LR didn't cause the crash. It was Dan Tull (who has been very helpful) who suggested that LR might have been pushing my computer hard enough to cause a latent hardware failure, which does make sense to me.
To answer a few questions: The machine is a little over three years old. I have everything backed up on external drives (including LR itself -- I took the D-65 suggestion to get a dedicated drive and backup for LR). It has been hot in Boston of late and my computer has been doing funny things all week, but mostly related to LR (see other posts I've made on this forum, PhotoDigital and APAdigital if you're interested). One odd thing: I have LR sitting in a drive labeled Lightroom_Library, which houses the Backups folder, the Previews.lrdata file, and the lrcat file. I only got LR up and running last week, so I've been relying on the Backups folder to backup for the time being. I have been meaning to do some kind of drop and drag onto the secondary hard drive (Lightroom Library_BK) to do a backup of everything, but haven't done it yet because I wasn't sure how to do it correctly (needed to do more research, haven't gotten that far yet -- thought I might need to set paths properly...?). There wasn't anything on my secondary drive except some test lrdb files and lrcat files (I think). Now the only thing on the secondary drive is a text doc called mds-crash-state with the time of the crash shown as its date modified. At some point I designated that drive as some kind of backup for LR (again, hadn't sorted out the details yet). What's up with this doc on that drive? It must have been created at the time of the crash (hence my suspicions about LR).
Last night I noticed the computer fan was making loud noises (like it was a plane engine about to take off) so I shut it down to let it cool off (its been hot in Boston). Today one of my 8 external drives where I house my digital files would not mount, but I had some other problems with it earlier this week (I reformatted it and recopied the data it normally holds onto it). Jeff, is this what you mean about symptoms that my drive could be going?
Thanks again,
Paula Lerner
http://www.lernerphoto.com
[email protected]