• Welcome to the Lightroom Queen Forums! We're a friendly bunch, so please feel free to register and join in the conversation. If you're not familiar with forums, you'll find step by step instructions on how to post your first thread under Help at the bottom of the page. You're also welcome to download our free Lightroom Quick Start eBooks and explore our other FAQ resources.
  • Stop struggling with Lightroom! There's no need to spend hours hunting for the answers to your Lightroom Classic questions. All the information you need is in Adobe Lightroom Classic - The Missing FAQ!

    To help you get started, there's a series of easy tutorials to guide you through a simple workflow. As you grow in confidence, the book switches to a conversational FAQ format, so you can quickly find answers to advanced questions. And better still, the eBooks are updated for every release, so it's always up to date.

Back up

Status
Not open for further replies.
B

bda019

New Member
Joined
Apr 3, 2019
Messages
1
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom classic CC
Operating System
  1. Windows 11
Hi newby here 1st post , can I ask what may be a silly question, some times when I shut lightroom down a message asks me if I want to back up , i understand it does not back up photos just the directory’s my question is when should I want the back up and what do I do with it , also when I allow a back up when I re open LR all my photos have disappeared is this normal
sorry if this is a daft one my brain is fried at the mo
thanks
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Welcome to the forum. You should back up your catalog when it has work that you cannot afford to lose. If you work daily and do a lot of work, then you may want to back up more frequently than if you only do a little bit of work every now and then. Eventually you should cull out old backups that you do not need as they do take up space, but make sure to save a few critical ones, especially the most recent ones.

Regarding opening up LR Classic, check your settings to make sure LR Classic is set to open up your most recent catalog when it starts. This setting is on the General Tab of the Preferences Command on the Edit Menu.

Good luck,

--Ken
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
@Replytoken suggests using the default setting of "open most recent catalog" in your preferences. I find that using the option to open a specific named catalog is a better choice. Many of my clients have gotten into problems when using the "most recent" option. For example, they want to check on something from an older catalog and open it from the backups folder. When then are done, the close LrC and go on with their business. A few days later they come back and open Lrc (forgetting that the most resten catalog was the backup and not the current catalog) and procede making imports, updates and changes to the backup catalog when they thought they were in their current catalog. I had a client a couple of months ago that had been using a backup catalog for over a year without realizing it. It was only after grabbing an older photoe that he swore he had spent a lot of time editing but finding that his edits were not there did he call me to figure where his edits went.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
bda019 said:
Hi newby here 1st post , can I ask what may be a silly question, some times when I shut lightroom down a message asks me if I want to back up , i understand it does not back up photos just the directory’s my question is when should I want the back up and what do I do with it , also when I allow a back up when I re open LR all my photos have disappeared is this normal
sorry if this is a daft one my brain is fried at the mo
thanks
Click to expand...

I tend to keep my Lightroom Classic apps running 7X24 and need to remind myself to reboot the computer periodically and to exit Lightroom every few days to create a catalog backup.

As you mentioned Adobe only backs up the catalog file. So it is essential that you run a system backup app to backup all of your critical files including your images that are cataloge by Lightroom Classic.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Califdan said:
@Replytoken suggests using the default setting of "open most recent catalog" in your preferences. I find that using the option to open a specific named catalog is a better choice. Many of my clients have gotten into problems when using the "most recent" option. For example, they want to check on something from an older catalog and open it from the backups folder. When then are done, the close LrC and go on with their business. A few days later they come back and open Lrc (forgetting that the most resten catalog was the backup and not the current catalog) and procede making imports, updates and changes to the backup catalog when they thought they were in their current catalog. I had a client a couple of months ago that had been using a backup catalog for over a year without realizing it. It was only after grabbing an older photoe that he swore he had spent a lot of time editing but finding that his edits were not there did he call me to figure where his edits went.
Click to expand...
Good point. I guess it is just an ingrained habit that I always check the catalog I open, and it is not often that I need to open my backups.

--Ken
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top