Comments on: Right Now, Go Backup Your Lightroom Classic Catalog (and here’s how)

By: Angus Gibbins

Angus Gibbins — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 02:15:31 +0000

In reply to Ian McLeod. I don't. It's an extra step that yields no real benefit.

By: Angus Gibbins

Angus Gibbins — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 01:51:27 +0000

In reply to Cynthia. Performance/Speed is probably your biggest consideration. Lightroom doesn't read drive serial numbers or anything fancy like that.

By: Cynthia

Cynthia — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 20:17:42 +0000

I needed to transfer my catalog to a larger external hard drive. I’ve duplicated the data from the old to a new EHD, but is there anything else I need to do (consider) before starting to use the new external hard drive as my primary? I’m basically going to change the drive letter to the new EHD to match the former, but I’m not sure if the serial number of the drives is what LR is reading. ~ Thanks for any resources or suggestions

By: Rob Sylvan

Rob Sylvan — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 17:30:25 +0000

In reply to Angus Gibbins. This is a good way to go. I do the same.

By: Rob Sylvan

Rob Sylvan — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 17:29:22 +0000

In reply to Anibal Martel. Also keep in mind that LrC does not write to individual photos by default, so converting to DNG alone does not ensure edits (or anything) has been written to the actual photo's own metadata.

By: Anibal Martel

Anibal Martel — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 10:10:20 +0000

In reply to Ian McLeod. Converting to DNG is probably a good idea because all the information is inside the file, yes, but there is a big problem with this. If you make a change in a keyword that affects for example 1000 images then the system you use for backup copies will have to save 1000 DNG files again, in the case of making the same change with a proprietary file of the camera it will only be the backup system is required to save the sidecar files which is much lighter and faster.

By: Ian McLeod

Ian McLeod — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 02:55:17 +0000

This assumes one doesn’t use DNG which I still don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t. DNG stores the edits in file. I convert all photos to DNG on import and it works great. I wish printers used it too.

By: Angus Gibbins

Angus Gibbins — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 02:10:10 +0000

Recently realised that LR Classic locks the catalogue when it’s open. That means if your backup system doesn’t use snapshot technology (BackBlaze doesn’t for example) your catalogue isn’t getting backed up while Lightroom is open.

As a result I’ve started backing mine up every time I close Lightroom. That way my offsite backup is at worst is only one editing session behind.

The file compression is good enough that the backups folder is usually a few GB at most, and if it does grow too fast I’ll write a script that cleans it keeping the last 10 or so backups.

By: Scott Kelby

Scott Kelby — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 00:15:39 +0000

In reply to Al. Your comments helps a lot. smh.

By: Al

Al — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 08:38:43 +0000

I never use this backup, Time Machine does the job better.