Back Up Your Lightroom Catalog(s)

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
I've been using Lightroom since early 2013. I am a little OCD in my organizing so I don't have a single Lightroom catalog with everything, I have yearly catalogs to organize my shoots by year (though I am currently rethinking this), and separate catalogs for the Infrared and Drone work I do. In the 6+ years I've been using Lightroom I've never once had an issue with a bad catalog.

Until last night.

I used the drone to shoot the sunset last night, and when I went to import the images into the Drone catalog I couldn't get it to bring up the import dialog. It was showing me catalog images, but they were from much earlier in the year and were not, to the best of my recollection, the last things I looked at, but regardless it didn't seem to want to get to the point where it would recognize the card in the computer and launch the import. So, I decided to just do a manual copy of the files to the location Lightroom would have put them, eject the card, and then import from the HD. Restarted Lightroom and got the same thing.

Uh-oh.

So I went into the catalog directory and added a '.old' to the current catalog and then went to the Backups directory to see what I had available. Thankfully I had been promptd to back up after the last use since it had been over a month since I'd shot drone images, and I'd taken the minute it takes to do so. This meant I'd lost nothing in the catalog. I copied that backup into the working directory, reopened Lightroom and everything was just fine.

I've always had backups on the Lr default of "ask once a week", but after yesterday I've decided to have it ask every time I exit the program. I doubt I'll back it up that often (I clean up backups after 3 version) but this way I'll at least be able to ask myself if the work I'd done in that session was significant enough to warrant it. If all I did was import images and didn't work on them then probably not. But if I've spent more than an hour or two doing work in Lr then I'll likely take the time to back it up because it's certainly easier than doing it again.
 

Woodyg3

Senior Member
Contributor
Yep. If I could figure out a practical way to do it, I'd backup my backup, too.

I'm glad you didn't lose anything, Pete.
 

BackdoorArts

Senior Member
Yep. If I could figure out a practical way to do it, I'd backup my backup, too.

I'm glad you didn't lose anything, Pete.

Catalog directories get backed up once a week with my regular laptop backs, so I'm pretty good. I'm on a Mac and use Carbon Copy Cloner instead of Time Machine. It's great because it creates a bootable drive in case for some reason I cannot boot to my Mac (happened once when I accidentally filled my HD), and it will act like Time Machine and keep files that were on my HD but no longer are in an archive, so if I ever accidentally delete something it will be there as long as it made one backup.
 

nikonpup

Senior Member
Jake/Woody. We are making someone very rich saving our memories which will probably end up in a dumpster. Till a new tech comes along some of our photos we have posted will be out there somewhere.
 

Woodyg3

Senior Member
Contributor
Jake/Woody. We are making someone very rich saving our memories which will probably end up in a dumpster. Till a new tech comes along some of our photos we have posted will be out there somewhere.

Yeah, I just want to keep my photos until someone tosses ME in the dumpster one of these years.
:)
 
Top