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Lightroom Backups Made Easy
June 29th, 2009
Hope you all had a great weekend. I’m gearing up for Ethiopia this week, I leave Friday morning. That means I’m up to my ears in creative briefs, gear, and a mountain of little detaily things that always seems to predicate these trips. But you’ll be pleased to know I’ve got posts lined up for the week and there will be a new desktop wallpaper on the 30th. July 1st is Canada Day so to celebrate I’ll be announcing the winner of the signed 20×30 canvas I announced HERE.
On the subject of backups, I trust, for the sake of your sanity, you’re being diligent. Most of us back up our image files religiously. Are you also backing up your database files for Lightroom or Aperture?
You absolutely need to be sure your Lightroom Catalog files are backed up. Lose them to a corruption or hard drive failure and you lose a heartbreaking amount of work. Lightroom allows you to specify where these backups can be made and when. Problem is, none of the options offered include one to backup when shutting Lightroom down, which is when I would want to do it – after I’ve imported, made changes, etc. All their built-in options are for backups when Lightroom is launched and I think that’s really lame.
So because I embrace my paranoia I finally did something about this. My main machine has several internal drives. One is my main drive, and another is the backup of that main drive. The rest are drives for RAW files and until recently they also held my Lightroom Catalog files and got backed up in a pretty haphazard way.
So here’s what I did. I moved them all – I have 6 right now – to a folder marked LIGHTROOM CATALOGS on my main drive. My main drive gets backed up by Super Duper to my internal backup drive automatically every weekeday at 9:30pm. So now I have automated back up that is never more than 1 days old, unless it all goes down on Sunday night, then it’s 2 days old.
Now all you have to do is re-open your catalogs, go to Lightroom > Catalog Settings > and under Backup Catalog chose Never. Should you have a problem you’ve got recent backups sitting on your back up drive and Lightroom won’t keep asking you about it.
I did pretty much the same.
LR catalogs on Internal drive -> hourly backup by TimeMachine to another drive -> another backup (by LR) to yet another drive.
Have a safe trip!
Thanks for your tips david. I was just up to do my backup (never done it !!!!!!!!!) and it gives me another way to do.
Im not sure how Lightroom works since I use aperture and thats a single file, but after a fatal crash in 2006 where I lost 8500 images now I have 2 backups on separate drives at home and an offsite backup at my office. Im not losing any more images!
From experience, may I suggest that you want to , at least periodically, backup to an EXTERNAL drive, and keep that physically separate from the computer. If the machine fries, or is stolen, you will still have your files / catalogue. The paranoid’s mantra should be “no single point of failure”
If you’re a big Preset user you should back those up also. There’s a setting in Lightroom (at work at the moment so can’t tell you exactly where – let me know if you can’t find it) that lets you change the directory where your presets go. Think is it tied to where your Catalog is saved. Anyway, make sure you save that directory too. I save them both to an external drive.
Need to find the same thing on PS – haven’t got that far yet.
Oh, if only you’d posted this last week. Funnily enough, my catalogue got fried on Thursday during a power outage and I was only on a weekly back-up schedule. As luck would have it, I was VERY productive last week, so I lost A LOT of work. So now I’m backing up practically every hour, until we got an external hard drive to do something similar to what you propose here.
Thank you, as always, for your helpful advice. If I’m manually copying the image files and corresponding XML files that LR creates, am I covered? Or is there yet another set of data that LR keeps that I’ve neglected?
Glan – You have two things to consider. One is the images which you’re backing up manually. The other is the Lightroom catalog itself, basically a database, and if it gets corrupted you’ll potentially lose all ratings, labels, keywords, collections, and any presets or development settings applied, as well as anything stored in web, slideshow and print module. In short, you’ll have the images (if you’ve backed them up) but not all the work you’ve put in to them, so be sure the LR catalog is backed up, not just your images.
aha … of course. Thanks so much for pointing that out. Being still a bit of a newbie with LR, I wouldn’t lose much there but now is the best time to start good habits
Thanks, David
David, I have a question. so I have a back up with all my pictures…I obviously can’t keep all my work on my computer…so I deleted a lot of my work on my computer, but then to view my old work I would have to re-import, and I think probably re-edit it…is there a way to have it off my computer but be able to access it when i need and with all my edits?
David
A very timely post. I just deleted about 14000 images, but not to worry. I was very good about backups, right? But there is the rub. Not realizing I had deleted them, I did a backup. This deleted the images in my backup, as my backup was creating a mirror image of my main drive and was not creating sequential backups. My drives are now in the hands of a data recovery service. Lesson? Know how your backup works. Not all backups are created equal.
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