hindssites
New Member
- Joined
- Jul 19, 2011
- Messages
- 4
- Lightroom Experience
- Intermediate
I am posting this for those who may not be aware of the limitations of Lightroom's backup. Light room is a great product but its backup is not something you should depend on. This is not a complaint, but something only I wish I had know so I would not have lost all the work I had done
I had carefully followed instructions on how to make up a backup of my Lightroom catalog to a secondary hard drive thinking everything was safe. When my primary drive crashed I soon found out that Lightroom makes a backup of the Catalog file....and no more. This file is similar to the index page you might find in a print catalog. In other words, it tells you where the images are, remembers your collections, presets, etc, but does not contain the images. Yes you can backup the images on importing, however you cannot link the backup catalog file with the backup images. If that main Lightroom drive crashes the backup "catalog" file is useless to restore Lightroom back to before drive failure. You still have your backup copy of the original images but you have lost all editing, all collections, all presets,etc. You are back to the beginning with, thankfully, your original files, and a software copy of Lightroom...but no more.
Looking back I wished I had used a third party backup to backup Lightroom. Hundreds of hours of importing, selections and editing would of been restored within the hour.
I had carefully followed instructions on how to make up a backup of my Lightroom catalog to a secondary hard drive thinking everything was safe. When my primary drive crashed I soon found out that Lightroom makes a backup of the Catalog file....and no more. This file is similar to the index page you might find in a print catalog. In other words, it tells you where the images are, remembers your collections, presets, etc, but does not contain the images. Yes you can backup the images on importing, however you cannot link the backup catalog file with the backup images. If that main Lightroom drive crashes the backup "catalog" file is useless to restore Lightroom back to before drive failure. You still have your backup copy of the original images but you have lost all editing, all collections, all presets,etc. You are back to the beginning with, thankfully, your original files, and a software copy of Lightroom...but no more.
Looking back I wished I had used a third party backup to backup Lightroom. Hundreds of hours of importing, selections and editing would of been restored within the hour.