Lightroom is designed around a database, and all databases are at risk of corruption.  Lightroom’s catalog is no exception.  There are plenty of preventative measures in place, but these things happen.  Backups are absolutely essential.  You’d hate to lose all of your changes!

Hopefully you already have a sensible backup facility in place, but unless your backup system keeps different versions of each file, it’s still worth letting Lightroom’s integral backup run too.  Why?  Because otherwise you could end up accidentally overwriting a good copy of your catalog with a corrupted copy.  If you let Lightroom’s backup run too, then you’ll have uncorrupted copies of your catalog too.

Lightroom’s integral backup simply takes a copy of your catalog and places it in dated subfolder.  We’ll cover how to change the backup location, and how to restore backups, in future posts.

Don’t forget, Lightroom’s backup does NOT back up the photos.  You need to do that yourself.  My personal preference is for File Synchronization software – Vice Versa for Windows or Chronosync for Mac are my favourite.