• 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.

Catalog zip backup files

Status
Not open for further replies.
st.neri

st.neri

New Member
Joined
Oct 20, 2019
Messages
5
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
LR CC 8.4.1
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.14 Mojave
I admit I haven't really been conscientious about how I organize and backup files for the last 15 years with lightroom. I have amassed >200,000 images and have them backed up periodically on the cloud or external hard drives. I am attempting to get more organized now that I am progressing.

Two questions to that end:

1. When I back up using lightroom backup, I notice that I have several backup zip files. Is that the most efficient way to perform backups? Doesn't that just use up more of my external hard drive space? What is the most efficient way to backup?

2. Please refer me to a better system to organize my images than I already have. Link to article or something... Thanks!

I have attached images that should illustrate my situation.

Jason
 

Attachments

  • Screen Shot 2019-10-20 at 1.06.35 PM.png
    Screen Shot 2019-10-20 at 1.06.35 PM.png
    788 KB · Views: 342
  • Screen Shot 2019-10-20 at 1.15.33 PM.png
    Screen Shot 2019-10-20 at 1.15.33 PM.png
    508.7 KB · Views: 327
Sort by date Sort by votes
those zip files are ONLY backups of the LR/Classic Catalog THEY DO NOT CONTAIN YOUR IMAGE FILES! ! ! !

Adobe does not provide a backup tool for the actual images - this is up to you, outside of LR/Classic. It sounds like you are already doing this.

Each time you let LR/Classic do a backup it creates a new Zip file that contains the state of the catalog at that point in time. How many back versions you keep is purely personal but I had a case many moons ago where I had to go back close to 9 months due to a corrupted catalog problem that Adobe couldn't fix. My personal handling of these is this.

1) Take new Backup when I shut down LR the last time each day
2) Keep them all for 9 months
3) For those between 9 and 24 months old, keep the one closest to the 1st of each month
4) For those older than 18 months, keep 1 per quarter

Another trick I learned is to include the LR version number in the name of my catalog. For example "LR8 Master Catalog" (you don't have to bother with dot releases). By doing this, if you do have to go back to an older catalog at least you'll know what version of LR it related to and if you will have to update the recovered catalog to the current version in order to use it.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
This is helpful. And yes, I understood that the zip files didnt contain my images. The files do get bulky though.
Thanks for the response!

Jason
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
As far as the organization of your images on your hard drive using date based folders as you show is quite adequate.

Since you are running on a Mac the simplest and most cost effective method of backup is Time Machine (TM). If your not already using it I suggest that you do.

The last step in implementing a really safe backup strategy is to have something offsite. You could of course use several TM drives and rotate them to some offsite location or even simpler subscribe to one of the dedicated cloud backup services such BackBlaze or CrashPlan. I do not recommend using any of the "free" cloud storage services because they don't provide a true "incremental" backup. Plus they are probably mining your metadata for their own purposed to pay for the "free" service.

An incremental backup such as those mentioned above detects and stores any changed files so that if a problem occurs you can step back in time to get a version prior to when the problem happened.


-louie
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
What would you suggest as a backup tool or program for Windows?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
bbaddiley02 said:
What would you suggest as a backup tool or program for Windows?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
There are any number of backup tools for Windows. A free program seems popular among enthusiasts. Macrium Reflect. Of course, there is also a paid version with more features.

At the other end, there is a rather complex but very powerful program called Retrospect. Go for the Desktop version.

For simple directory synchronization between two drives or systems, I use Beyond Compare and Goodsync.

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