Catalog in use?

[geezerhood]

I keep my catalogs and files on an external drive and hook that drive up to three different computers at various times.  Sometimes when I go to open a catalog I get a message saying that it is in use by another user.

I always exit C1Pro before removing the external drive from the computer.
I always do a "safe remove" of the external drive before unplugging it.

The only way I have been able to get past it was to hook it back up to the computer of last use, open up the catalog then close it again and do a safe removal of the external drive. So far that has worked every time, but I am concerned that I will be on the road in the future and unable to open a catalog at all since the last use computer might be hundreds of miles away.

What is causing this message to show up randomly?
Is there any way to override the lock out?

Thanks,

Don

[geezerhood]

I was surprised the nobody had any suggestions on this problem. Maybe I am the only person here who has experienced it. Recent attempts to get rid of the lockout have failed which means I have been locked out of a catalog unless it was opened on a specific computer, for several days. 

Before I submitted a help request to Capture One I figured I would try one more time to get rid of the lockout by copying the catalog to another location and renaming it, but was still unable to get in. As I was browsing the catalog folder I noticed a file named writelock and the light went on in my gray-haired noggin.  I renamed that file to writelock.bak and the lockout was fixed.  It looks like that file is generated every time you open a catalog and then deleted when you close it. For some reason C1Pro was not changing the write status when I logged out.

This issue has only showed itself on a Windows 7 install. My Windows 8 so far has been trouble free.  Repeated open / close cycles on the Windows 7 box was fruitless.  The file has to be deleted to get past it.

[Kevin Raber]

I had this issue once and it cleared itself.  What I could determine is I had a catalog open on my iMac which I moved over to it.  Then when I was about to travel I dragged the catalog to my laptop.  I do not think I closed the catalog on my iMac prior to doing that.  When I got back I went to the catalog on the iMac and it was the one that opened on launch of C1.  I closed it and dragged it to the laptop to see if there was any effect and low and behold it opened. So, what i can determine is the Catalog registers it self to the last computer it is open on and locks out others.  Typical was to prevent overwriting data on a file at the same time. 

I work in sessions when I am shooting and after the session folders are moved to my Raid system ( 2 x 16 tb Pegasus thunderbolts) I then catalog the session.  This allows me to take the catalog with me when traveling if needed.  I will drag a catalog from the raid onto my laptop.  Then work on it and when i return I drag it back to the RAID and do a REPLACE when prompted.  This has worked well from me.  But, I always make sure I close out a session as well as a catalog before moving them.

Kevin Raber

[geezerhood]

Thanks for the input Kevin. I am guessing that I did something similar to what you mention in your post, though I don't recall exactly what.  What was troubling was that no matter how many times I reopened the Catalog using the machine where the write lock originated followed by a proper exit from C1Pro and ejecting the drive, the write lock remained.  You would think that the app would get rid of that writelock once that was done, but  I went through the open / exit / eject routine for that catalog a half dozen times and it still remained. ( I was unaware of the writelock file at that time. )

There were a few threads over on the phaseone.com Capture One forum talking about this, but I was not able to access that forum for almost a week due to a bad favorites link. See this thread: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=92841.0 
or I probably would have been able to fix it much sooner.

Here is one of them at phaseone, dealing with the Mac version.

http://forum.phaseone.com/En/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=15932&p=75033&hilit=writelock&sid=4adc2cd43c62a96fbfcc000d021d1ecd#p75033
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Re: Catalog Locked.
Postby UCS308 » Tue Feb 25, 2014 5:43 am

1. Find the catalog.
2. Right click and select show package contents.
3. Delete the file called writelock.
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In Windows it is a bit different. Navigate to the root of your Catalog folder and delete the file there named writelock.