Lightroom Catalogs, how far back to do keep

picturegirl

I have just filled up another external hard drive, I was wondering if you keep all your catalog backups or do you go through and delete some? It would seem I don't need them all if the latest catalog has everything anyways.

Any thoughts on deleting backed up catalogs, pros cons????

RobSylvan

You are correct. As time goes on (and you add more photos and do more work in your catalog) your old backup copies become more and more out of date. If you ever had to fall back on a backup copy you would want to use the most recent copy. I periodically delete all but the most recent 2 or 3.

arodney

I in fact never keep any of the backups, don’t let LR even build em. Kind of useless IMHO when there’s so much more that needs to be backed up (like images, presets, etc). Instead I dedicate a drive to all images and LR files, then clone that on a regular basis to multiple drives. I get the catalog and everything else backed up which seems far more useful.

RobSylvan

While I agree with your process, I have met a lot of folks who have found having a recent backup catalog on hand to be very useful if their working catalog gets corrupted/hosed and their full system backup hasn't updated as recently as the last backup catalog. Since it is automated, easy and free, I still think it is worthwhile. Especially if you are not religiously backing up your entire system, which in my experience, most people aren't as consistent in this area as they'd like to be.

arodney

RobSylvan wrote: »

Since it is automated, easy and free, I still think it is worthwhile.

It can be free and automated (Carbon Copy Cloner at least on the Mac). I’m sure on Windows there’s something similar.

colourbox

My catalog backups are already almost a gigabyte each, I can't let those fill up a disk. I regularly go through and delete several.
But I don't blindly delete from the oldest up. I delete alternating catalogs so I have backups over a longer time period.

picturegirl

This is very helpful information! I did have a corrupt file in Lightroom and I lost all my edits on a wedding. Even after reloading an old Catalog the file was still corrupt!! I backup everything at least 3 times, I am too afraid I will lose pictures. Hardrives are cheap but if I continue to fill them up as quickly as I have lately it will become very expensive. I think I will start deleting the old catalogs, I like Colourboxes idea of alternating backups.

BradfordBenn

I only keep one backup catalog in my Dropbox folder and have it set up to do it once a week. The main reason I keep the old one is that it is faster to restore often then having to restore from a backup. But if you are doing a good reliable backup you might not need to keep any at all. The key is to think about your backup strategy and see where the holes in it are. I am in the process of doing that right now.

jfriend

I keep about the last five catalog backups and that's all. The point of the catalog backups to me is that if you suddenly find a problem with the LR database, you can go back to one of the backups, but as long as your catalog has been working fine for awhile, I see no reason why you'd need an old catalog backup.