backup strategy

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123photo

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Hi all,

Where can I find a presentation of a backup/archiving strategy for my LR catalog ?
Thanks,
 
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123photo, Welcome to LR Forums.

Backup strategy is discussed here in a number of threads; I'm not sure there's any one best way. I'll offer some general advice, but you may want to hit the search button at the top and find some other ideas.

I'll assume you're relatively new to the product and start at the beginning.

There are principally three(perhaps four) classes of items that need to be backed up

1) Your original photo files.
2) Your Lightroom catalog/database
3) Your derivative or exported files
4) LR allows you to optionally embed certain database parameters related to your images, either directly in the image files, or in companion files, called sidecars. With minor exceptions, this data replicates data maintained in the LR catalog in 2) above. The reasons for doing this are a topic for another thread.

1) LR can help you here. You can direct LR to automatically create a backup copy of your original photo files as you import. This is convenient, and effective, as it enables to maintain two (hopefully on independent devices) copies of your originals, before you clean them off your camera/flash card. If you don't choose to use option 4) above, in general these files won't change as you use LR, and your import time backups will probably suffice. At this point many users also burn copies on removable media for redundant or off-site backup as well.

2) LR can help you here. You can direct LR to ask you, at optional intervals, to create a backup copy of your LR catalog(s), as you load them into LR. Again, send this backup copy to an independent device.

3) LR is only of marginal help here. If you have created all the derivative files from LR, it will be easy enough to reproduce them in the future, should they disappear. Many folks delete these types of files as soon as their immediate need is met. Otherwise, you will have to use some sort of OS/3rd party backup tools to maintain copies. Or you could do it manually, depending upon the complexity and volume.

4) Should you choose to employ this option, then your live copies of the original files will be changing from minute to minute as you work with your images in LR, and you'll likely need to backup these up as well. Again, you're on your own here, LR doesn't provide a facility to assist in this. Most folks use an OS based or third party backup program.

There are additional infrastructure factors to consider, such as LR preferences, presets, profiles, among others. That can be a lesson for another day.

It's likely I've left something out somewhere. If so another member will be sure to chime in.

Now, go find some of the pertinent threads here to get a feel for practical implementations of all this. Questions, clarifications? Just ask.
 
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One 'Gotcha' for Mac Leopard users:

I posted elsewhere:
It is not recommended to back-up your LR Catalog with Time Machine. In fact it may be why you now have a bad catalog. Time Machine should be set to no include your working Catalog (.lrcat) and need not do the Previews since they are so readily generated (Why waste the back-up space.?)

Do set your Catalog to be backed-up regularly to a location other than a sub-folder of where your Catalog is. Then Time Machine can back-up your Back-ups

Problem is, with both LR and Aperture, that Time Machine is too prone to corrupting your catalog if done while LR is open and accessing the Catalog at the same time. This is exactly why LR is a Single user database and not Networkable.
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Don
 
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Brad's summary of what needs to be backed up is excellent. Here's what I do to backup the catalog itself, on Windows:

I use SyncBackSE to back up files. I have it set to make a backup of the .lrcat file to another hard drive every 3' minutes. Now, it can't back up the file while LR is open, so what this means is that the catalog is backed up within 3' minutes of my closing LR. That fits well with my work style, as I rarely have LR running more than a few hours at a time. I do not back up the previews, as LR will regenerate them as needed. The destination hard drive itself gets regular backups, including offline, so I have multiple backups of the .lrcat file, of various ages, in various places.
 
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I have a question about backups. I hope I can keep this simple. The premise I have come to is that there is no need to backup my catalogs from within Lightroom before backing up my hard drive. I back up my entire hard drive on a weekly basis, so I don't see where backing up each catalog from within Lightroom is necessary. Am I forgetting something here?
In addition to posting here, could you please email me your reply at [email protected]
Thanks for your help. Frank.
 
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Frank, Welcome to LR Forums.

That's fine, if you can afford to lose a week's worth of LR work. Some of us are hobbyists, and use LR an hour or two a week. Others are working pro's with whole shops depending on LR, and many, many person-hours per week.

Backing up a single/few <1GB file(s) is trivial; your priorities, your call.

As for personal email service, see the Thread Tools on the toolbar above, and elect to subscribe to a thread of interest.
 
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The Lightroom backup is also protection against corruption Frank. If your catalog became corrupted, and then your weekly backup ran, you'd have a nice backup of a corrupted catalog, and no catalog you could work on, whereas if you let LR run its backups too, then if the file became corrupted, you'd only lose any work you'd done since the last LR backup ran.
 
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I'm not sure if my query has been answered by the above or not!

I've only been using LR seriously since the spring, and I'm now approaching the time of the year when I need to start taking past jobs off my hard drive to create space for the autumn work.

My original RAWs are already stored on DVD, with no change from how they were captured beyond a rename.

I also create a disk with my edited jpegs.

My LR catalogues are backed up regularly.

Generally speaking a work with one catalogue, holding all my wedding and portrait shoots fpr the year - the reason I do this, rather than having one catalogue per job (which I know many of you do) is that I like to build up collections as I go of the best images during the year, so I can find them easily when it comes to finding shots for the website or brochures etc - I'm presuming that collections will only work within a single catalogue and not across mutlple catalogues - correct me if I'm wrong please!

My question is this - should I need to retrieve any images from my archives and reload them to fulfil a future order, will I be able to reload them in some way that LR will remember them and reapply any adjustments I've made to the image? I hope all of the above has made sense!

Jerry
 
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Jerry Fenner said:
My question is this - should I need to retrieve any images from my archives and reload them to fulfil a future order, will I be able to reload them in some way that LR will remember them and reapply any adjustments I've made to the image? I hope all of the above has made sense!

Jerry
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For this, you need to also backup the XMP files along the RAW files. You can create those XMP by either selecting images and press Cmd-S (Ctrl-S) or configure Lightroom to write them automatically (for faster computers). For JPEG, TIF or DNG, the information normally in XMP for RAWs (NEF, CR2...) is embedded into the files.

This information will keep develop settings, ratings and some but not in which collection the image was for example. That is if you also remove the images from Lightroom's catalog.

If, after writing metadata back to files (the XMPs), you remove them from disk outside of lightroom but keep them in the catalog, they will simply appear as "missing" and the catalog will keep track of collections they were in. To reload in the future, simply but them back in the folder they were.

If you remove from disk without writing the XMP info, you MUST KEEP them in the catalog. Writing the XMPs with the backups is good practice in case of total Catalog loss/corruption tough.
 
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Denis Pagé said:
For this, you need to also backup the XMP files along the RAW files. You can create those XMP by either selecting images and press Cmd-S (Ctrl-S) or configure Lightroom to write them automatically (for faster computers). For JPEG, TIF or DNG, the information normally in XMP for RAWs (NEF, CR2...) is embedded into the files.

This information will keep develop settings, ratings and some but not in which collection the image was for example. That is if you also remove the images from Lightroom's catalog.

If, after writing metadata back to files (the XMPs), you remove them from disk outside of lightroom but keep them in the catalog, they will simply appear as "missing" and the catalog will keep track of collections they were in. To reload in the future, simply but them back in the folder they were.

If you remove from disk without writing the XMP info, you MUST KEEP them in the catalog. Writing the XMPs with the backups is good practice in case of total Catalog loss/corruption tough.
Click to expand...

Thanks Denise - this clarifies things for me, and confirms what I'd hoped - as long as I maintain the catalogue, I can remove the originals and reload if necessary - that is what I hoped would be the situation. My PC is a little old now, so I have the XMP write option switched off.

The pointer about backing the XMPs in case of catalogue corruptiuon is a good one, and a point to bear in mind.

Thnaks again, and I feel happy to start clearing some space on my drive!

Jerry
 
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Glad it is clear. But, if you backup and remove the photos. Where is the "backup" then...? You should never let your images in a state where you have only one copy of them! And two copies on the same drive is risky too.
 
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Catalogue backup is on an external drive, automatically backed up to another external, along with all of my contact data, etc etc; images are on DVD's, one set inside the house the other set off site.

Jerry
 
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You are all set then! ;)
It seem that I did not read the whole thread/posts before replying tough... :oops:
 
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