daf40 Loc: Mesa, AZ

I am a relatively new Lightroom user. I have somewhere in the vicinity of 12,000 photos on my hard drive, about 1/3 of which have been added to the Lighroom catalog. I just backed up all of the 12,000 photos to an external hard drive with Windows Explorer. I didn't back them up with Lightroom, nor did I backup the Lightroom catalog. I am sure that I completely screwed up my backup, but I'm not sure how to correct it. Do I need to start over, add ALL of my photos to the Lightroom catalog and then use Lightroom to backup the photos and catalog together? Or can I selectively back up some of my photos outside of Lightroom? Any suggestions of how to correct this problem?

DGStinner Loc: New Jersey

Lightroom does not backup photos. You can, during import, choose to have a second copy made which could be thought of as a backup. When you close Lightroom, it should ask to backup the catalog. You should have it backup the catalog to a separate drive than your active catalog, that way if the drive fails, you'll have the backup to recover from. You don't have to have all 12K photos in the catalog to backup the images.

rwilson1942 Loc: Houston, TX

Copy your LR catalog (latest one) to the external drive with the photos.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

And repeat this step periodically as you work in LR, say once a month to the external HD or whenever you back-up new image files to the external HD.

daf40 Loc: Mesa, AZ

I just checked. It's there, with the photos. My concern is this: Will the catalog which I copied from my hard drive be able to locate photos on the external hard drive or, more importantly, will it be able to locate the photos if I ever have to restore my photos from the external drive?

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

The catalog on your external drive is a copy from your computer. If you use that catalog as a recovery, it will contain pointers to where your files used to reside on your computer's harddrive. So, if you were recovering the images as well from the external back-up, those files need to be copied to the same locations as well. But, within LR you can also update the location if needed. So, if the files used to be C:\original\pics (for example). But, when you recovered you needed to place them someplace else such as c:\mynewpc\pictures; within LR it will know the "pointer" to the image is no longer valid for the old location. LR has an icon showing the image can no longer be found at the original location. You can click on the icon and start a dialog to navigate to the current (new) location of the image and have the LR reference updated to the new location as well as all images in the same location are also updated.

So, if you need to use that back-up as recovery, try to copy from the external drive back to the original location(s). If not possible, you can work within LR to update the references to the changed location.

WayneT Loc: Paris, TN

Part of my work flow is to push my photos to a backup drive. I have a Vaio Canvas that I take with me when I'm out and transfer pictures taken during the day to that computer. I can do most of my PP work in the evening on the Vaio and back these up to a portable drive I take with me just in case. When I get home I move all of these finished photos into a backup drive at home that is in my LR catalog and in turn that drive is backed up into a cloud. This protocol allows me to access my photos from either my Vaio or my desktop computer for PP work (depending on weather I want to do that work watching television or sitting at the desk). The key is that I have all my drives and my backups (except the cloud) connected to Lightroom.

This works for me very well an gives me multiple backups at the same time.

brucewells Loc: Central Kentucky

Backups are quite important, and it's important to spend some time designing/determining how you're gonna do it. I commend you for asking the questions.

First, I suggest a good backup software title to organize how you do your backups. (I use SyncBackSE, which is free) Then, become familiar with the folder structure on your system so you know where the files are that you want to back up. They aren't all with your catalog file. Lastly, be diligent in performing the backups.

daf40 Loc: Mesa, AZ

Thanks to all for your advice, but I am becoming more uneasy with each response. If my hard drive ever crashes, and I have to restore my photos from the backup external drive, they will all be in a new location after the restoration. I am afraid that the Lightroom catalog won't be able to find any of the photos in their new locations, and that all my Lightroom metadata will be lost. If that's the case, I suppose exporting all the edited photos might be one solution, but not a very practical one. Storing them on the cloud might solve this problem, I suppose. I didn't have this issue when I edited everything in Photoshop Elements.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

You're projecting a few items onto a potential recovery that are not necessarily accurate. First, placing the original files from backup onto your new harddrive at the same (prior) location is more likely than not. Second, the catalog retains all the metadata and edit data regardless of whether the original image file exists or not. Third, I described in an earlier post the general process of updating the catalog entries to the current image file location. In this recovery scenario what you'll need to do is point the LR catalog entry to the current location of the file if it has moved. This may be time consuming if your images are maintained in well organized subfolders, but is no more complex than opening one image and telling LR where the image now resides and instructing LR to update all 'missing images' that reside in this new location. Finally, you might consider outputting a full-sized image of your 'final' edits from LR and backing-up those files as well. This idea is a personal decision. It's something I do in my workflow so that if I did completely lose my catalog and all back-ups (a catastrophe I hope to never experience), I would at least have the final version of an image along with the original RAW files. Then again, my catalog is backed-up to an external HD along with my RAW and full-sized edits, so to permanently lose one would likely be that I've lost all including my 2nd offsite back-up as well ....

brucewells Loc: Central Kentucky

Well, first, the process of backing up and securing your data has nothing to do with which software titles you use.

I have historically used 2-drive systems. This means my PC has had 2 physical drives inside it. One is drive C:\, the other drive D:\. Drive C:\ is where I install the operating system and software. Most software titles will generate, or manage, data. (i.e. Lightroom manages all of my photos) and that data resides on the D:\ drive. I backup both drives, but the one I'm most concerned with is drive D:\. There is no set way to perform the backup. Each user, and PC, is different and as users, we have to decide how best to design our backup routine.

If drive C:\ fails, all I can do is get a new drive, reinstall the operating system and all software titles that I typically use. But, my backup for drive C:\ will have configuration files that I can copy back onto my system to make it quicker to get my system back up and running.

If drive D:\ crashes, I simply restore my drive D:\ backup (after installing a new drive, of course) and when it's done, I'm immediately back up and running.

The backup is simply a copy of your data. If you ever have to restore that backup, the structure of that data is inherent and it will be copied back to your PC in the proper locations by default.

Hope this helps.