Last night I received a sad email. It was from a young woman whose external backup hard drive had died some time ago, and she hadn’t yet found time to replace it. Unfortunately now her main working drive, which held her only remaining copy of her images, has also died and is not recoverable.
She emailed me because she had been religiously hitting the backup button every time Lightroom asked her to do so, and she now wanted to know how to restore her images from that backup.
The problem? Unfortunately she had never actually read the dialog that she had been saying ok to for all this time. The dialog that clearly states that Lightroom’s built in backup only backs up the catalog containing the metadata, and not the images themselves. That’s not good! And by default, the catalog backups are stored with the working catalog, so they were stored on that dead hard drive. I wish I could tell you it had a happy ending, but so far, it’s not looking promising.
It’s a tale I hear far too often, so allow me to say this loud and clear once again… LIGHTROOM’S CATALOG BACKUP DOESN’T BACK UP YOUR IMAGES. (It’s also not going to do you much good if it’s stored on the dead hard drive, although that’s a minor issue if you’ve just lost all of your photos.)
Dead hard drives can happen to anyone, and at any time. Are you sure you could restore from your backups?
In my next post, we’ll consider backups in more detail, but if you’re keen to get a solid backup system in place in the meantime, feel free to download this excerpt from Adobe Lightroom 3 – The Missing FAQ, which gives a quick checklist of things you need to ensure you’ve included in your backups (PDF download). Feel free to drop by www.lightroomforums.net to talk about your backup strategy too – someone may spot a hole that you’ve missed!
“It’s a tale I hear far too often, so allow me to say this loud and clear once again… LIGHTROOM’S CATALOG BACKUP DOESN’T BACK UP YOUR IMAGES. (It’s also not going to do you much good if it’s stored on the dead hard drive, although that’s a minor issue if you’ve just lost all of your photos.)”
I have always felt that this was a design flaw in Lightroom, and the fact that you hear stories like this “far too often” only emphasizes that point in my mind. Backups are so important to the digital photographer that they should be absolutely intuitive and foolproof in a program like Lightroom.
The fact is that when most users use a feature called “backup”, they expect that the feature will back up everything, from the database structure to the images. Lightroom should be intuitive and you should not have to think too hard about something as important as the backup function. Lightroom should require that you make backups on a separate drive, and it should automatically back up images as well as library structure. This is really a no-brainer. Aperture does this flawlessly and without much thought from the user. Why does Lightroom feature such a non-intuitive and non-user friendly backup mechanism? I think the backup warning dialog is a poor substitute for a properly designed backup feature.
Richard, I agree that LR could do with an image backup feature, although we should all be backing up our whole computers anyway, so I do wonder how many serious users would even use it. Most of the image deletion issues I’ve heard have been new or irregular users.
Right in the middle of wedding season last year my motherboard died and I learnt that Lightroom back-ups don’t do what I thought. I was able to get all my images, but in their original format with none of the changes I’d made. Not a nice moment when I realised that so much work had disappeared, but at least I got my originals out unscathed and learnt a very valuable lesson about how Lightroom works.
So sorry to hear that Jane! I’m glad your originals were ok though.
While I agree the term backup is accurate, I think it’s doing a great dis-serve to the very purpose. I’d venture a significant portion of users (likely a minority but still significant) don’t understand the process and this give them false-confidence. If the point it to help protect users, they should change the name because the net effect is presently exactly what you described.
First, yikes. I live with a nagging fear of that kind of data loss.
Your post leaves me thinking that maybe “backup” is just the wrong term for what Lightroom is doing there. “Backup” is a very loaded term that, if taken literally, suggests more safety than is really being offered. We all (should) know that a proper backup does not live on the same drive as live data.
As your post suggest, a casual glance at the dialogue can leave a user thinking “I’m safe, I backed up Lightroom”. While those that truly ‘get’ Lightroom and asset management and backup schemes know that it’s just one part of a larger plan.
I’d suggest removing the word “backup” and instead calling it something like “saving a catalog snapshot” to offer recovery in the event of catalog corruption.
Just a thought.
-Andy
[It’s doing exactly what it says on the tin Andy – it’s a backup of the catalog, and you can (and probably should!) change the location to another drive. I do agree though, it’s caught a lot of people out. The event of catalog corruption is exactly what it’s there for, but it’ll never replace a solid full system backup.
It’s also a good reminder to read dialogs before pressing ok – deleting thousands of images is another one I hear regularly, where the dialog says are you sure you want me to delete these 1000 images from the hard drive and someone presses ok thinking they’re just deleting 1 photo! – VB]
Without knowing why the hard drives died I’d suggest she take a look at this video at Gibson Research. It’s about Spinrite a great hard drive recovery utility
http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
My experience: Backups should be never done by an application itself. They should be done automatically by a “sophisticated” dedicated backup program to a dedicated backup medium, e.g. an external hard drive which is connected only during the backup.
But as sophisticated a backup program is: If the user does not spend time in reading it’s manual and learning what filesystems are, where the programs are storing the user data and other principles of a computer, the probability of a “disaster” will be significant higher.
[I agree Elmar – even if Lightroom had been backing up the images, she still didn’t have another drive for them to be backed up onto. There are a lot of lessons to learn from this one. – VB]
Was she able to recuperate some images from the previews.lrdata file?
[So far it appears that was on the dead drive too. She wasn’t backing up anything to any other drives. – VB]