Apologies for being unclear.
1 I wanted to get all my Lr data, accumulated over several years, and still found in catalogs named Lr 3 etc - into one new master data (which I called VP).
2 However, on closing Lr (5), I found it was backing up into my old Lr3 files, and I was then reverting to actually importing into this old catalog.
3 So I have two catalogs, or possibly more, with incomplete data in them, though the total of each are approx 18.000 and 19,000plus images. I have made a record of what is in each, and actually it is the 2014 folders which are partially missing. I always save into dated folders and keep in chronological order.
I do hope this makes some sense.