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A Curious Question...

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Bill Ballard

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Premium Classic Member
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Nov 13, 2017
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140
Location
Southeastern US (Currently)
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
LrC 9.4
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.15 Catalina
...to which I saw nothing posted in a forum search...

How often do you backup your LrC catalog when exiting the software? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Every time you close LR?

As I said, only a curiosity. And in case you;re wondering, I've been doing a daily backup, but am thinking of shifting to weekly.
 
I suppose it depends on your photography. Is it a business (wedding, portrait, etc.)? If so, every time you quit, it would be wise to let LR do a backup. But if you're like me, pretty much a weekend photographer, I'd opt for once a week, which is what I do. I usually keep one or two of the latest backups, and trash the old ones. I then copy the zipped backup file to Dropbox as an extra safety measure, overwriting the previous zip file that's there.
 
Mine’s set to once a day. But if I opened the catalog just to look at or export a few things and didn’t make any meaningful edits, I’ll often tell it to skip this backup.

Since accumulated backups can take up a lot of space, every once in a while I’ll open the Lightroom backups folder and clear it out except for the last few monthlies.

The general rule for any backup is that you ask yourself how much work you don’t want to have to redo, and that’s the interval to set it for. For pros, the question is how much work can you afford to lose. I’d never want to lose a week of work, so I set it to daily.
 
Once a day for my business catalog (I'd lose SO much work if it was longer) and weekly for my home one (and if I do a lot on the home one, as in after a big shoot, then I do extras on demand)
 
I rely on Mac Time Machine to back it up. It's important that if you rely on a continuous backup program that you exit LR periodically -- otherwise, the snapshots captured by the backups will sometimes/often not restore properly. I exit when I've done for the day.
 
Mine’s set to once a day. But if I opened the catalog just to look at or export a few things and didn’t make any meaningful edits, I’ll often tell it to skip this backup.

Since accumulated backups can take up a lot of space, every once in a while I’ll open the Lightroom backups folder and clear it out except for the last few monthlies.

The general rule for any backup is that you ask yourself how much work you don’t want to have to redo, and that’s the interval to set it for. For pros, the question is how much work can you afford to lose. I’d never want to lose a week of work, so I set it to daily.

Thanks everyone - I've generally been follow what Conrad described, so maybe I'll stick with that.

It was actually when I noticed my weekly malware/virus scan was scanning catalog back-ups from 2018 that I even thought about this. I think I'll go in and clear out the backups on an annual basis. Starting in '21. :p (I have trust issues...)
 
I rely on Mac Time Machine to back it up. It's important that if you rely on a continuous backup program that you exit LR periodically -- otherwise, the snapshots captured by the backups will sometimes/often not restore properly. I exit when I've done for the day.

I also use Time Machine...

And I upload my finished work to the cloud, and back-up across multiple hard drives. Trust issues, as I said...
 
I tend to leave my LrC running 24X7 to pick up inbound images sync'd from Lightroom. I have you remind myself when ever I am doing ding work or have imported a lots of new images from the cloud that I need to make a new backup catalog.
My backup schedule is everything I exit LrC (which isn't often) any time in between.
 
Many answers to a simple question have been provided

in Risk management one has to balance cost/effort with consequences and likelihood.

The cost/effort to let LR run a backup is quite small - almost negligible. Maybe several minutes each time (during which you can be doing other things anyway) and some minor disk space which is both cheap and reusable later.

The consequences of losing your active catalog can be anything from trivial to major catastrophe depending on many factors. If all you do is save a few selfies now and again the world won't end if you had to lose a few weeks worth. However, if you are a wedding photographer, loosing a few weddings would be a serious matter.

And the third factor of likelihood is moderate. Disk drives fail. Earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes and just bad luck happen. So rate this at a 50/50 probability of needing a backup in the next 2 years.

So, with those 3 factors (Very low cost of doing a B/U, Some level of consequence if catalog is lost, and a 50/50 probability over 2 years of needing to go to a back up and the extremely low cost pretty much skews the results in favor of daily.

Dan
 
After every session in which I have added or edit photos or applied metadata
Same for me. Plus I've written a script that runs daily to remove the "old" catalog backups. "Old" is defined as "at least 3 months old" and "not in the 10 latest backups"
This powershell script runs on Windows only, but if someone is interested, send me a PM, i'll be happy to send it to you.
 
This powershell script runs on Windows only, but if someone is interested, send me a PM, i'll be happy to send it to you.
This same script could probably be rewritten using the Mac Automator app.
 
I use a utility called 'Hazel' on my Mac to do this.
 
A strong case for daily, at a minimum, or every time...
 
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