How To Properly Backup Your Lightroom Catalog And Photos
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- Опубліковано 27 сер 2024
- As a photographer, backing up your photos is one of the most important things you will ever do. This tutorial will show you how to properly back up your Lightroom Catalog and photos, so you never have to worry about loosing your photos again.
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Backing up your Lightroom Catalog can be confusing and time consuming, but it doesn't have to be. In this video I will walk you through my 1-2-3 backup method that I have been using for years. Redundancy is the key to never loosing a file. If you follow my backup routine you'll sleep soundly at night knowing that all of your precious photos are safe and sound on multiple hard drives as well as the cloud.
I use Backblaze cloud software in my everyday workflow so I don't loose my data even in the worst case scenario. Backblaze makes backing up my photos to the cloud easy and affordable. There's no limit to how much data or how many hard drives you can backup!
I store my RAWs in a DAS drive and manually backup to another DAS all via Thunderbolt, will definitely look into CCC for automatic backups. Thanks.
I just built my first home server using an older MBP and have both DAS drives attached to that, all in the garage, so my desktop is less cluttered and definitely more quiet.
That seems like a great solution. One of these years I’m going to have to upgrade to server system.
- Mike
Thanks for the helpful video. I hadn't thought of using cloning software to backup to my external HD.
Yes, the cloning software tends to be faster than just copying the old fashioned way
Thanks for this, I'm useless at backing up, I have thousands of old files on an old machine which i had backed up to an XHD....during a house move that XHD has got misplaced, so now I can't access the images....I'm sure I'm find the XHD one day but the stress it's caused is unreal. So I need to get my arse in gear and back up properly cheers for the info subbed.
Oh my! That’s stressing me out too just thinking about it. Backblaze can be a bit of work if you have many external drives so I bought a couple of 24TB externals and then backup those to the cloud with Backblaze.
I hope you find your missing drive
Great video. Very informative, thanks! I see on the video that you have a "2023 catalog". Does that mean you create a new catalog at the beginning of every new year? What about if you only use one catalog? Thanks!
Hello, I create a new catalog every year because I fill up a 5TB external drive each year. The process for backing up would still be the same if you are only using one catalog. You still want to make a copy of all of your photos as well as your catalog files onto a separate external drive. I highly recommend using a cloud back as well.
Thanks!@@naturemikephoto
Thanks Mike for your clear and concise information. I am wondering about how to relink a backed up catalog to a backed up raw files.
Let's say I have an external backup system which saves both my raw files and catalog folder. I can restore both to their original locations, ok... but if the original location is no longer available (broken, stolen computer or drive...) I'll have to restore to a new location. Then the links in the catalogue database will all be wrong, all files will be shown as 'missing' or 'disconnected'. The command 'reconnect missing files', would be a pain to run fro a large database.
Do you have a different solution? Thanks a lot!
Check out this video: ua-cam.com/video/mv_mLaB5NQI/v-deo.htmlsi=DzrUQf-Vu4h0S_Eq
thanks a lot, just what I was looking for@@naturemikephoto
Mike two more questions:
I noticed you don't have smart previews in your lr folder. Not useful to you?
Do you also backup your Presets? How?
Thanks in advance
Good question. I do not use smart previews because they take up a lot of space and my LR catalog is on an external drive so there’s no need for them. They might help LR load faster, but I shoot a lot and rather have that space for more photos as I fill up s 5TB just about every year. I do not really use presets so I have not backed them up in years but maybe I’ll make a video on how to do that in the near future. :)
Thank you for the informative video. Doesn't using Lightroom's built-in backup system also optimize the catalog? Do you feel that optimizing is necessary?
Hello, I am not certain if backing up through Lightroom optimizes the catalog, I do know that you can check for catalog integrity during the process. The reason I’m not a fan of backing up through LR is because it can be quite time consuming. One thing to Keep in mind is that it is best practice to make sure LR is closed before you start a backup.
You can manually optimized your catalog in LR by going to File > Optimize
There nothing wrong with using LR to backup the catalog just know it will take extra time.
@@naturemikephoto Thanks for your response. If Lightroom is set up to backup the catalog, when closing Lightroom, there are 2 boxes you can tick within the backup box to either test the integrity, optimize the catalog, or both. I also use an external SSD as I like to have full use of my photos and catalog on both my desktop and laptop. I just began using your suggestion of keeping a disk or partition image of the entire catalog. I use Backblaze for my cloud based backup. I appreciate and enjoy your videos.
So do all your LR selections and edits come with the drive clone/copy? I am having a hard time understanding where all that information is stored and how I can move it to my backup drives.
All of your edits and organizational information is stored within the Lightroom catalog file. You can always create a back up catalog when you close Lightroom but I don’t do that because I regularly pack up my main catalog. The catalog file ends with .lrcat
Curious why Carbon Copy is needed if you are also using Backblaze? Is it so you have 2 Cloud Backups just in case? Or is it because Backblaze doesn’t back up entire drives?
Hello, carbon copy is simply so you have a second hard copy. It’s not really required but I’m a big fan of redundancy
Don't understand how you get from Lightroom Classic photos on our computer to a hard drive.
The best way ids to use hard drive cloning software such as carbon copy closer. Alternatively you could drag and drop your parent photos folder and the .lrcat file (Lightroom catalog file) to an external drive.
Thanks Mike, I will try it out. thanks again for explaining.@@naturemikephoto
Not interested in buying more software.
Carbon copy is only $30. You can still do the backup without the software. It’s just a bit easier with it.
I'm reading, learning...already feeling I'll be back to change my comment to THANK YOU, THANK YOU...uno momento...lol@@naturemikephoto
Cheers
What is your RAW file backup workflow?
Hi Gabe, great question. The workflow that I explained in this video is also my RAW file backup system. I simply create a new catalog on a new drive and move over any important Images. I have a video on how to move photos and edits between catalogs here. ua-cam.com/video/bzlidcHMOtI/v-deo.html
If you have a lot of files you might want to get a large 20 or 36 TB drive for your backup drive and then back that up to Backblaze.
@@naturemikephoto when I contacted backblaze about backing up Lightroom library and catalogue they responded with this:Our backup service does not support backing up external drives that have a format that isn't natively read/writeable to that OS. Some applications can be used to simulate this environment, but we do not support it. We only explicitly support APFS or HFS+ on Macs, and NTFS on Windows. You will not be able to reliably back up an NTFS drive on a Mac.
Hi Gabe, I wasn't aware that they did not support all drive formats. Are you on a windows machine? I'm a mac user and format my drives in the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format and have not had any issues. Sorry, I know this doesn't fix your problem if you are a PC user. I wonder if there's a workaround though.
@@naturemikephoto I’m on mac. if you’ve had no problem neither should I. Not sure what they’re talking about
Oh, then just use Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for spinning drives and APFS for solid state drives and you should be ok.
so what do you do once your working drive gets full? that is my problem, do you just buy a bigger drive and keep copying to that?
Yes, you’ll have to move to a bigger drive. I typically just start a new catalog on a 5TB drive and only move my most important photos to that drive. Here’s a video about moving photos from one catalog to another. How to move photos from one Lightroom catalog to another.
ua-cam.com/video/bzlidcHMOtI/v-deo.html