It’s “Backup Your Lightroom Catalog” Wednesday!
Hey, it’s that time again! It’s “Backup your Lightroom Database Wednesday.” If you haven’t backed up your Lightroom database for a while (and if you’re wondering right now if you have….then you haven’t).
So…bring up Lightroom’s Preferences (press Command-, on Mac, or Ctrl-, on PC), and then click on the General Tab at the top. At the bottom of the General Preferences, click on the “Go To Catalog Settings” button. When the Catalog Settings preference panel appears, in the Backup section, where it say “Back up Catalog” choose “Next Time Lightroom Starts Only,” (as shown above), then close the preference and Quit Lightroom.
Now, open Lightroom again, and it will ask you if you want to backup. Click the Backup button, and that’s it—you’ve backed up the database (catalog). Now, go back to the preferences and set it up so this happens automatically (either once a day, if you use Lightroom each day, or once a week, if you don’t). You’ll thank me. Not now. But one day. 
Or just use Time Machine that comes with OS X Leopard, so much easier, just plug the external drive in, and EVERYTHING import gets backed up. If you keep it plugged in up you get hourly, daily and weekly backups too, so if you accidently messed up that original photo, you can just go back a few hours and retrieve it. Time Machine!
I was wondering about Time Machine… does it do a good job with lightroom’s structure? I am sure it will back up files as they are downloaded from a card and added to HD, but does it know to backup the catalog? I suppose every time you change anything it would change the lastmod of the catalog, so time machine might back it up every hour or something? Just wondering if people have first hand experience.
Thanks,
-Chad
How about also optimizing your catalog? And deleting old backups? If you’re backing up weekly you might gain some hard drive space by deleting the old backups.
You can go to Edit>Preferences>General>Go To Catalog Preferences to both optimize your catalog and see exactly where your backups are stored.
won’t Time Machine make multiple copies / backups of catalogs and previews?
that is GB and GB and more GB of stuff!
I just need the latest copy of the catalog [ a while ago it happened once that the current catalog got corrupted and I had to use the backup copy]
but I think Time Machine might be better for small files than one huge databas.
I use Synk every other day to backup to a couple of different external drives. I don’t need LR to do the backup that often.
my Catalog is about 900 MB -I found out that I can archive / zip the back up copy and the size shrinks to 1/9th of teh original size.
and yes I delete old copies
Scott,
What is the best way to free up hard disc space by deleting older backups?
Hey Scott,
I’m a big fan of your work with ‘the photoshop guys’ and recently started to read your blog as well.
)
Just as a coincidence i was wondering about the back-up features in lightroom…
I’m a pc user, and i have a separate hard disk for my pictures, so i’m about to do a format of my OS disk (something you need to do on a regular base with windows
I’ve backed-up my lightroom database, i’m afraid, if i format, restore my lightroom database, he won’t find the files? or can you confirm that there is a way to restore this?
this is the only thing holding me back of doing this format, and I’m not about to try this before i’m sure all my files are restoreable
thanks in advance
sam
How do you change where the backup goes to? I want it to back up the catalog to a separate hard drive, but for the life of me can’t figure out how to do it.
HELP .. my storage drive has crashed and is unrecoverable I have a second backup of photofiles except for the most recent 10G or so – BUT they were imported and backed up in LR .. how do I restore them .. cant find advice anywhere on this
Thanks in advance
T
Jim A: go to Lightroom -> Settings -> Catalog Settings -> General and set your Catalog backup options. The next time you start Lightroom (assuming you’ve set the backup settings appropriately) you’ll have the option to choose the location of the backup.