swimweb1 Loc: Webster, NY

I am confused about Lightroom Catalog backups. I routinely backup the catalog and have 100's of backups. I also routinely backup my photos to an external drive and at the same time backup all of the 100's of catalog backups. By now I have gigs of catalog backups. My catalogs point to photos for the current year on my laptop and for previous years to photos on a disconnected external drive. So when I backup a catalog is it maintaining all of the settings for the photos that are the external drive as well as the photos on the laptop. I only connect the external drive when I want to reference a photo from a previous year or do a backup. Once a year I move last years photos to the external drive and delete from the laptop. I also delete the previous year's catalogs once they are backed up the external drive. So what catalogs do I need to keep.

fredpnm Loc: Corrales, NM

First, what process do you use to 'move' last year's photos to the external drive?

As for catalogs, you need only the most recent...maybe two if you must, but certainly not more than that. That includes ones on the laptop and those on the external drive. However, it is best to back up the catalog on a drive different than where the catalog is actually located. If the catalog is on C: drive, the backup needs to be on a different drive, say D or even the external drive, but most certainly not on C:

swimweb1 Loc: Webster, NY

I see the process Lightroom desires for moving photos to the external drive as not workable. That is because about every month, I copy all of my new photos from the laptop to the external drive and leave them on the laptop. I actually do more than that, since my philosophy is edit and keep a photo or delete it. Once I finish editing a set of photos, e.g. a high school soccer game, than I backup the catalog and also output the photo collection to separate folder on my laptop, as well as post the photos to my Smugmug site. I then take the photos in the separate folder and also output them to a USB dirve. When I copy the photos to the external drive I copy both the original by date and also the edited photos by collection, plus all of the Lightroom catalogs. Come a cold day in January, I delete the previous year's photos from the laptop and then need to re-establish the catalog links to the new external drive for every day individually. I wish Lightroom allowed me to point the whole year to the new folder, but they require me to do it day by day. To move the photos by Lightroom, means waiting till the new year to do any backups or delete the backup to let Lightroom move it, which says I have no backup while that process works. Thanks for the information provided above.

P.S: I have photos in Lightroom back to 2008 when I started with a digital camera. Since I am in my 70's I have thought about what happens if something happens to me. My wife and kids are not going to use Lightroom. So some days I wonder if the outputed edited photos by collection is what I should really be focusing on once I move to the new year. There are a couple of other things I do. I pick out the best family photos each year and make a photobook with a copy for my wife and each of my kids. At that time I also put all of the photos that are in the photobook (about 750) on a USB drive and give it to the kids as well. This way I did my part of giving them the family photos of their family. We know a family whose house burned down and almost all of he photos were lost.

R.G. Loc: Scotland

Backups are all about recoverability. There's no point in keeping catalog info on files that aren't available any more, and likewise for files that you're not likely to want in the future. Exporting tiffs of the edited keepers may seem to be an extravagant use of storage, but if it saves you from keeping bloated catalogs, it'll save storage space in the long run. As you've already noticed, backup catalogs use up a LOT of storage.

rmcgarry331

Lightroom stores all of the PP information, and metadata information in the catalog. You can create an additional "backup" of this by enabling the option write metadata to xmp. This will create a sidecar file next to your image file, with the pp and metadata. During the backup process Lightroom (Classic) checks the catalog for corruption, so you need to preform them at intervals. You especially need to back-up prior to upgrading a version number. Store your back-up in a different location, than your Lightroom catalog. That being said you need to clean out old back-ups manually. There is no need to keep any more than the last 5 and most people only keep 2 or 3.

ColonelButler Loc: Niagara-on-the-Lake ON Canada

You have a few things going on here that I think could be simplified. First - you should not be moving files outside of Lightroom! You will loose all of your edit data.

It sounds like you do want to use an external drive to store your current year's photos which you keep on your notebook computer. You are using an external drive as an archive. In order for the external drive to retain all of the edit data, the files on it need to be in a catalog separate from your notebook.

I'm not sure if I totally grasp your situation with catalogs on the external drive (archived by year) but if possible, I would start by merging all of these catalogs together using Lightroom to form one catalog for all of the photos on your external drive. Your notebook would have a catalog that contains only current year photos. At year end, open your merged archive catalog (bringing up your archived photos) and do a File>Import from another catalog...

Select the current Lightroom catalog file from the hard drive of your notebook and select the option to include the original files. Lightroom will copy the current year files to your hard drive and update the catalog of the merged archive catalog.

As far a passing along photos to family, how about getting another external drive and populating it with your best keeper jpg's that anyone could view without Lightroom.

Of course all three sources should be backed up in the cloud.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

As ColonelButler notes in the comment above, swimweb1, you seem to be creating a mess in your current LR usage.

You should have a single master LR catalog that 'sees' all your images you've ever imported into LR. The images in your LR catalog (LRCAT) will tend to be the original image files, all consolidated into a single drive, although you can connect multiple drives (sources) in a single LRCAT. In my LRCAT, I have some images on the local C: (windows) drive, but the majority of my images are on a USB-connected portable drive, a drive I call J: on my system.

The LR BackUp function operates only on the database data of the LRCAT. It does nothing about your actual image files. That is your job, not Adobe's. There's no pruning function of the backup files Adobe creates. That's your job too. Just go into the Lightroom\Backups folder and view / sort the files by their data-stamps. Depending on how often you let the Adobe back run, I run weekly, you need to purge the out of date backups. I periodically delete all backups older than 1-month.

As you review and update your personal backup strategy, you want to assure you're backing up both your image files and your entire \Lightroom folder that includes your master / active LRCAT file. You should purge (delete) the out-of-date LRCAT backups prior to making backup copies of the \Lightroom folder to save both time and space.

swimweb1 Loc: Webster, NY

Thanks for the response. It helps. In my case I only have one catalog and it is on my laptop and then backed up to an external drive. That one catalog points to all my original photos on the laptop for the current year and all of the previous years photos on two different external drives (duplicated). If I have the external drive attached to my laptop, then Lightroom references all my photos across both the laptop and external drive and has all my edits.

As I said in one comment, we know folks whose house burned down and they lost eveything, hence I do not wait until the end of the year to backup the current year's photos to the external hard drives. We take the laptop on cruises, bus excursions, etc., so I always backup my photos to the external drives before we go. Since I already have the photos on the external drive, at the end of the year, by date I have to find them on the external drive using Lightroom. That relinks everything to my one catalog.
so the I will have to look into how to move the photos at yearend from the laptop from within Lightroom. I hope it is not date by date, which I already do. After I do that, I will then delete the backups I already made.

As to the comment re exporting an edited copy by collection to an external drive, I already do that. Plus at yearend, I give a copy to each of my kid's families so the photos are at their house as well as mine. I also export all of the edited photos to Smugmug.

swimweb1 Loc: Webster, NY

Thanks for the response. From what I understand, you are saying I can delete alot. I have attached a Word document that is screen shots of all my catalog information on my laptop (the external drives have more). What I gather is I need to keep the files that end in a "13" the newest version, as well as the 10/24/2023 backup in the backup file. I can also delete the 2015 file (which I called 2025 on the word document). That is a 2.5 Gig folder by itself.

The "13" version links to all my photos on the laptop as well as all of the previous years photos on the external hard drives (I previously found all of the photos using Lightroom to establish the link to the photos that had been moved to the external drive.

Attached file:
(Download)

Attached file:
(Download)

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Remember to use <quote reply> so a back n forth discussion has context. Consider too, just embedding / attaching screen shots as JPEGs rather than Word documents.

I'm not completely sure what you're presenting. Your "Lightroom" folder seems to contain what I'd expect to find in a multi-year subscriber's folder. You have multiple copies of your LRCAT, versions that are being created by Adobe during their periodic software updates. These too are unneeded, but are a bit more problematic to clearly understand the purpose and possible removal. You'd need to view the details of the files and analyze their 'create date' and 'last update dates' to identify the files just laying around unused and candidates for removal. If you have backup copies of these files (archived onto your backup media), then removing (deleting) from your primary storage is less risky.

But, when we look inside your backups subfolder, this gets more confusing. I'd expect to see just compressed (ZIPPED) copies of the LRCAT, not entire folders like you've presented. That is, not Backup > dated folder > entire LR folder, including more backup folders. Alas, selecting something 'old' from 2015 is probably the worst folder to present for analysis. Instead, the contents of the most recent 2023-10-24 would be the best folder to look inside to get a feel for what is currently happening.