Memos From The Digital Darkroom

One of the first things to understand about Lightroom is that it’s a cataloging software. That means that everything you do in Lightroom is recorded in a type of database.That’s why any edits you make in the Develop module are non-destructive - they can be undone at any time in the future.

The analogy I usually use is that Lightroom is like the card catalog at the library that contains records of all the books on the shelves. In Lightroom’s case, the books are the photo files stored in folders on your hard drive. Because the Lightroom catalog contains all of your metadata, such as keywording, and all of the develop settings for the files processed in it, it’s important to make sure that this information gets backed up. Lightroom provides for this by giving you options to make backups at varioius intervals when you launch the program. The figure below shows the Back up to Catalog menu in the General Catalog Settings (Mac: Lightroom > Catalog Settings, Windows: Edit > Catalog Settings). In this case it’s set to ask to make a backup of the catalog once a week.

The Lightroom 2 Back up catalog options in the Catalog Settings

The Problem

Making a backup is always a good idea. However, there’s a slight problem with the way backups of the Lightroom catalog are managed. Every time a new backup is created it’s added to a folder with any previous Lightroom backups. That means that if I make a backup every day, I’ll have seven backups by the end of the week. If I haven’t done much editing during the week, all of these backups will be almost identical. Additionally, as the size of the catalog grows, these backups also grow in size.

I recently had a client with a large catalog call me asking if he could do something about the 40+ backups that were taking all of the available hard drive space on his system. I told him to delete all but the three most recent backups.

I really wish that Lightroom 2 had a feature like QuickBooks that allows you to limit the number of backup files. On my QuickBooks system I limit it to three backups. When number four is reached, QuickBooks asks me if I’d like to delete the oldest backup.

If you need to delete some of your Lightroom backups, you may have to do a bit of sleuthing to find out where they’re being stored. The easiest way is to wait for the next time the Backup Catalog dialog box opens when you launch Lightroom, shown below. If you want to see it now, go to the Catalog Settings, shown above, and choose Every time Lightroom starts from the Back up catalog menu. You can change it back to a different setting later. Now all you need to do is relaunch Lightroom and navigate to the folder and delete some of the older backups.

When the Back Up Catalog dialog box opens, you can check to see where your backups are being stored.

Do You Really Need to Backup the Catalog?

One way to avoid this whole situation is to do regular system backups of all of your important files. I automatically make a mirror backup my documents folder and other important files every day. I use backup software called ChronSync by Econ Technologies on my Macs. On my Windows machines I use a free app from Microsoft that’s called SyncToy. Both of these flexible applications allow you to create all sorts of backup scenarios. If you’re using one of them to make a daily backup of your Lightroom catalog, it’s not necessary to have Lightroom make its own backup. This is probably the easiest way to avoid the the Lightroom catalog backup problem. It also allows you to insure that you’re backing up other important files as well, such as all of your image files - those books on the shelf.