Unfortunately there is always risk when it comes to electronics...faulty equipment, surges, carelessness, misfortunes, mother nature, is my way better than yours...not necessarily, the so called "Cloud" it's just a bunch of computers all susceptible to failure. In my eyes, I suppose it depends on what you stand to lose should something go wrong. My wife says I'm paranoid when it comes to my work, backups and security. Am I 100% protected, absolutely not. Do I feel secure... yes. An once of prevention is worth a ton of sorrow for sure.
I have set up backup systems for many that didn't have any in place, unfortunately when it was to late, they paid for it and I don't mean in cost for my services, mostly lost data and or down time when they could be doing business something a bit more enjoyable. Usually cause they didn't take the time to set up some sort of backup...not doing anything is a tough learning curve. It's not if something can fail, more like when will it. Could be as simple as creating a restore point or just a systems backup, an initial snap shot of a new computer OS when first turned on. Which I think is one of the most important and the one most over looked, they to often think, ahh! new computer, what can go wrong, what's to back up? Anything is better than nothing.

To begin with, I would suggest that you set Lightroom to backup your catalog every time you close it. You can bypass the backup, if you want to and haven't really done anything but look, but it's good procedure. When I import my photos, they are written to an external drive connected to my iMac AND an external NAS at the same time! Both of these devices are configured in RAID 1. My external NAS, backs itself up to another external NAS, on its own a few times a day. In addition to this, I periodically ( bad here, only once a month) take hard drives to a friends house and bring a copy of his stuff back with me. Am considering cloud storage as well. Just my suggestions. Best of luck!

I'm sorry perhaps I did not phrase my question correctly. I do back up my LR catalog once a week on exit.. I know this is not my photo back up . I used a tube video tutorial which instructed me to open LR in Library I selected the folder all my photos are in and righ clicked and selected export these photos as a catalog to my external drive I know they are on my external I checked get info and35,000 + items are there 2+ TB of space. My question is if I redo those steps will I create a 2nd backup or will it just update the existing backup

J

My guess is you'd create a second copy of exported catalog and images. The first thing that pops into my mind is whether you shoot raw. The exported images are very likely JPG. If you shoot raw, then should you have a disk failure, those raw images will be gone. On your external drive, you'll have all those images as JPGs. If you're okay with that, then I guess this will work.

The second thing that comes to mind is the amount of time devoted to that export. Your method will not check to see if a particular image is already on the external drive, so it will export it again. And again, take a long time.

True backup software determines which files have not yet been backed up and backs up only the images that haven't been. The time it takes to do this is substantially shorter than copying all the images every time.