We’re frequently reminded of the importance of backing up our catalog(s). But how often should you back up, and then how long should you keep the backups for? Here’s a few tips to help make your decision.
How often should I back up my catalog?
By default, Lightroom prompts you to back up weekly. (Even if you have your own backup system for catalogs, we recommend you use the Lightroom one as well – here’s the reasons why.)
If you’re working on a large number of photos every day, a week’s worth of work is a lot to potentially lose. So how much work can you afford to lose if the worst happened?
You can change the backup frequency to prompt you daily, weekly, monthly, or every time Lightroom exits. To do so:
- Go to Edit menu > Catalog Settings (Windows) / Lightroom menu > Catalog Settings (Mac) and select the General tab.
- Using the Back up catalog pop-up, select the frequency of your choice.
You can also change the frequency in the Backup dialog itself, when a backup runs. While you’re there, you can also change the location for the backup to be stored. We recommend this is different physical disk to the one your catalog is on, in case your main disk fails.
How long should I keep backups for?
Lightroom compresses the backups using ZIP compression so they don’t take up too much space on your hard drive. Of course, if you’re backing up every day, they can start to add up. The backups aren’t automatically deleted, but you can go to the Backups folder using Explorer (Windows) / Finder (Mac) and delete older backups yourself.
We recommend keeping a couple of older backups in addition to the current ones. For example, 1 year old, 6 months old, 3 months old, 1 month old, plus the most recent 4 or 5 backups. You never know when you might discover a mistake you made a few months ago, and want to retrieve settings for some photos from a much older backup.
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Being big on backing up, my setup is, I used a spinning disk external HD for data (which has a LOT of project files, paid and not, not just photography), including Lightroom photos and LrC files. I back up LrC every time I quit the program. Then, I back up this data drive to one of three backup drives, I use in rotation. Plus, once a month or so, I back up the data drive and various other dedicated drives to portable drives in a safe deposit box. There is w-a-y too much time invested in the files on my various drives to risk losing.
Sounds good. We use cloud backup for our ‘off site’, good to know you also have offsite as part of your strategy.
With all the time invested in photos, it makes really good sense to be well backed up!
What’s the best recommendations of where to keep your catalog? On a Mac. With the photo folder on drive or within the User’s folder? I’ve nearly lost everything when my NAS crashed and burned a few years ago, photos and catalog. Thanks.
I keep my catalog and photos on an external drive which makes it very easy to back up everything to a second external drive using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner, etc.
Oh wow, how scary! I’m glad you were able to recover everything. There isn’t a best place particularly, as long as it’s backed up regularly.
We hear more reports of issues with catalogs on portable external drives (that get bumped around or dropped) and with catalogs in cloud folders like OneDrive.
Other than that though, just make sure it’s somewhere that’ll get backed up frequently. Some backup software excludes external drives by default, so just double check that whereever you put it is included in your backups.
Re- backups. I suggest backing up the backups. I have an external drive that I copy all Lightroom data to. It’s my insurance policy.
We agree, we also backup to the Cloud (Backblaze) so there’s an off-site copy too!
Very helpful website Thanks for your effort
have some spare time now so Lightroom Here I come
I hope 😊
We wish you well with Lightroom! There’s lots of helpful information on our Blogs, also our books (some free) and Forums have a mass of information.