During my Adobe Photoshop Lightroom seminars I’m often asked how frequently one should make a back-up of the Lightroom catalog, as can be set in the Catalog Settings. My answer may surprise you, because it is “never”. Of course I do not mean that you shouldn’t make back-ups of your Lightroom catalog, but I don’t think it’s very useful to do so via the built-in mechanism of Lightroom itself. If you let Lightroom make a back-up, it will do so in the same folder where the original catalog resides. That means that you will lose your catalog back-ups together with the catalog in case of a hard disk failure. It may be useful if you open the catalog and it appears corrupted, but it is far from safe if this is your only back-up.

The reason why I’m not in favour of applications making their own data back-ups, is that this makes it less likely that the user sets up a good overall back-up system. Yes, your Lightroom catalog is important, so you certainly do need to make back-ups. But so are your financial data, your email databases and your address book data. If you keep your Lightroom catalog on your internal hard disk, use a general purpose back-up program to back-up the entire hard disk, not just your Lightroom catalog. If you use a Macintosh, use Apple’s Time Machine, it’s already installed on your computer. If you use Windows, there are also plenty of options. And remember that the catalog does not contain the original images, so do make a back-up of those images as well if they are on another hard disk (best is to back-up immediately when you import them, this is an option in the Lightroom Import dialog).

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom catalog back-up

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