Comments on: Lightroom Backups Made Easy

By: Photo News Today » Blog Archive » Lightroom Backups Made Easy - David duChemin (pixelatedimage)

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:36:43 +0000

[...] and Read More: pixelatedimage.com SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Lightroom Backups Made Easy – David duChemin (pixelatedimage)", url: [...]

By: Mac Payne

Mac Payne — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:52:23 +0000

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.

By: Fred Lee

Fred Lee — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:16:20 +0000

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?

By: Glen Goffin

Glen Goffin — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:40:46 +0000

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

By: David

David — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:35:55 +0000

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.

By: Glen Goffin

Glen Goffin — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:26:13 +0000

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?

By: kate

kate — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:52:50 +0000

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.

By: Scott McQ

Scott McQ — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:28:52 +0000

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.

By: Vic Kirby

Vic Kirby — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:02:50 +0000

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”

By: Craig Salisbury

Craig Salisbury — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:25:10 +0000

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!