Lightroom export as catalog?

PixNW

I recently tried "export as catalog" for all of the Lightroom images currently on the hard drive of my main computer, and exported to an external hard drive. What is the difference between doing that, and just using the regular backup? I believe that if you open either folder it ends up being just like opening Lightroom would have been on the day that you exported/backed up isn't it?

I'm wanting to figure out the best way to backup lightroom so that I have copies of all images in their original formats like DNG or JPEG, etc. Does the regular backup feature only backup any images that weren't previously backed up?

Any thoughts or advice would be most appreciated. Right now I'm backing up to two external hard drives to be safe, and backing up my best stuff onto archival DVD's as well.

colourbox

Typically, Export as Catalog is for exporting a part of the catalog, not the whole thing; just collections or subfolders so that you can back them up or move them to/sync them with another computer. The actual Backup feature is all or nothing; it's always the whole catalog database.

The Lightroom backup feature never backs up original images, only the Lightroom database that stores what changes you've made to the images. You should back up your original images separately. Maybe using the same method you are already using for the rest of your computer.

Export as Catalog does have an option to include the original images along with the catalog. But it's still probably better to use a smart backup utility of some kind (outside of Lightroom), because Export as Catalog will always send out all of the original images, even if none of them changed. That's a lot of time and bandwidth you probably don't need to spend.

Also you want to delete old backups from your Lightroom Backups folder periodically or all those big database backups will keep piling up and you'll wonder where all your disk space went.

PixNW

Thanks colourbox!