Retaining Virtual Copies

Question

Something Sean McCormack wrote about losing data, made me wonder why can't LR save virtual copies.
If LR could write a VC xmp file to go alongside the main XMP file or better if LR could write the VC data into the main XMP file, then the problem of losing VCs if one need to rebuild catalogues would be solved.
If one could also save collections data as a text file to reimport in case of catalogue failure/corruption/back up problems, that would be good too.
In fact a single export button for all prefences, setttings, presets, collections, keywords would be great.
[For all your products in fact as it's such a time consuming task to redo all one's personal settings and tweaks. PS lost them all the other day, for no reason that I can think of. Don't recall PS crashing or anything.]
Even if you carefully back up your LR catalogue, you are stuffed if what is backed up is also damaged. I have some corrupted images, also backed up to two other places, but all the back ups are also damaged too as the original files were damaged by 'disk error/bad cable connection'. I only discovered this a couple of years after the files were last accessed and needed to use them again. So even if one did back ups where you gradually replaced the data, you'd only find out too late. Ironically you are more likely to caught out by this if you back more often.

Answer 1

Have you tried extracting the page (Tools > Pages > Extract) and then inserting it (Tools > Pages > Insert from File)?
It would also be possible to do with a script that makes the page a template, spawns it as a new page, and then deletes the template. This could be made into a custom menu item or toolbar button if you need to do this sort of thing a lot.
Here's some code that will add a duplicate page of the one that's currently being viewed just after it:
// Duplicate the current page
createTemplate("t1", pageNum).spawn({nPage: pageNum + 1, bOverlay: false});
removeTemplate("t1");
This code can be run from the interactive JavaScript console (Ctrl+J) by selecting all of the lines and hitting Ctrl+Enter, or Enter on the numeric keypad.