Lightroom backup

13 posts / 0 new
Last post
Alison Powell
Alison Powell's picture
Lightroom backup

I've been looking at the best ways to backup my photos and just don't seem to be able to wrap my head around things.

I download my raw files onto an external drive then import them into Lightroom. I delete the photos I don't want from Lightroom and the drive.

Ideally, I would like to backup only the photos I choose to keep and also backup the Lightroom metadata for edited photos.

We have a 3TB (6TB mirrored) Synology NAS in the house.

We also use OneDrive for cloud storage.

If I copy everything from my external drive to the NAS together with relative paths intact, will the links between the catalog and my source files be maintained?

Thanks for any advice- I am NOT the tech person in the house but I'm the only one who uses Lightroom!

Gerry Bishop
Gerry Bishop's picture

Alison, I'd recommend that you NOT download your photos onto a hard drive before uploading to Lightroom. That's just an unnecessary step that then causes more work on the other end. Besides. Lightroom is designed to handle the downloading and coping and deleting of files, so you don't have to do that separately on your drive.

Here's what I recommend:
Insert your memory card into your computer, open Lightroom, and tell it to import the files from your card. As it does so, it will copy them onto the drive that you tell it to. After you sort through your photos, you can tell LR to delete all the photos you don't want, and it will do so--both from the LR catalog and from your drive. After you finish editing, all the edits will be backed up by LR and then saved for you to go back to if you ever want to.

Since LR has deleted from your drive all of the photos you don't want, your backup of that drive to the cloud will contain only the photos that you've decided to keep.

Any other questions, or if you'd like a Zoom tutorial on this process, just let me know.

Gerry

Craig Cooper
Craig Cooper's picture

Gerry & Alison,
The download process Gerry described is the one I use plus a periodic backup of all files to a 2 TB hard drive. File organization and locating old files easily is the big challenge. Perhaps a Zoom tutorial on the process, file organization and cloud storage alternatives would be helpful to some of us.
Craig

Bill Shaw
Bill Shaw's picture

Your metadata and all edit history of every photo is included in the 'Catalog' backup. The Catalog is a database that is at the heart of Lightroom and should be backed up as well. Note the 'Catalog' backup does not contain or include your photos.
Key to using Lightroom effectively is to use 'Keyword Tags'. this and metadata searches help you locate photos efficiently without having to rely on an arbitrary use a folder structure.

Alison Powell
Alison Powell's picture

Thank you all- I'll make the recommended changes. I have been terrible about adding Keywords but have been trying to go back and add them. Would one of you be willing to do a tutorial for the club- it can just be me who has found this confusing!

Tracy Kaminer
Tracy Kaminer's picture

Alison, I find it confusing as well. I also would appreciate a tutorial on file management. Step by step for dummies! (speaking for myself, of course)

Gerry Bishop
Gerry Bishop's picture

OK--I'll get a tutorial on LR file management organized. Gene Runion gave us a terrific series of workshops on this in the past.

Gerry

Gene Runion
Gene Runion's picture

Alison, you should copy the copy the files from your camera's memory the way it makes the most sense to you! The way you said you were doing is by far, in my opinion, the best, most versatile, and the simplest way. Downloading memory card via Lightroom has way too many confusing options that will bit you and this method doesn't fit my workflow. So in other words I totally disagree with Gerry on this point.

Backing up:
You said you "I download my raw files onto an external drive"; is that external drive the same or different than the "We have a 3TB (6TB mirrored)" ? If they are separate drives and if there is space available you can copy your photo files from your external drive to the 3TB mirrored drive. This can easily be done with a batch file. This is essentially what I do after I do my deletion and renaming of my photos. (My dismal Internet connection rules out the cloud for me.) If I had a fast Internet connection I would take time to understand Adobe's cloud as it may be the best solution for Adobe users. With your monthly Adobe subscription to Lightroom and Photoshop you do have some Adobe cloud space.

Using Onedrive is good option, assuming you have enough space on Onedrive or are willing to pay a modest fee for additional space. For this option you will need a fast Internet connection. Other cloud options to Onedrive that I would consider are Dropbox and Adobe's cloud. You could totally trust the cloud for backup or keep a local copy on an external drive which I believe is the best solution. If my internet connection would permit I would keep my photos on an external drive and a copy/backup on a cloud service. As stated above I would seriously look at Adobe's cloud even though I currently use Dropbox and Onedrive for various things.

Also there are backup services you can subscribe to. Gerry has such a subscription, I believe. Off hand I can't speak to the advantages of using an Internet backup solution compare to just using a cloud service that is available today.

The Catalog:
Unless you changed Lightroom's default settings for the catalog, all your edits and meta data for all your photos are kept in the catalog. The catalog must be kept on a local disk. Lightroom will make backups of the catalog but note the backup will by default be on the same disk as your working catalog which is far from ideal. The catalog will become large and so will the number of large number backup copies you will have so you must manage backups or you will likely run short into disk space issues! You should direct Lightroom to backup the catalog to an external disk; this is done within Lightroom's dialog window that you get upon exiting and when Lightroom asks if you want to do a backup of the catalog. The catalog is critical as it contains all the your edits and meta data, so you need to make sure you have a least one backup. In addition to Lightroom's backup I, about every two weeks or when working on something critical, I make an additional backup to a different disk. Starting a couple of years ago I believe Windows operating system keeps a history of your files, which would include the Catalog. Also you may have Windows backup services running which will also backup the catalog. (I have not kept up with all the newer services running on Windows). Backups can and are usually somewhat complex and I certainly have not covered all the points in detail or even all the points to consider.

Gerry Bishop
Gerry Bishop's picture

I haven't polled all the top Lightroom gurus on this point, but I'd bet that the vast majority recommend using Lightroom to copy your files directly from your memory card to your hard drive. I, too, was doing it the old way: copying the files to my hard drive first, but when I began to learn more about Lightroom I followed all the experts' advice and changed to the recommended way. I found it incredibly easy and I've never had any of the problems that Gene warns against.

If anyone would like a tutorial on how to do this, you should learn from the very best teacher in the business, Tim Grey. Here's his video on "Getting Started with Lightroom": https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=getting+started+with+lightroom+clas...

Don't get me wrong about Gene's method--lots of people continue to do it this way and it works just fine, but Lightroom is designed to make the whole process seamless, so why not use it the way it was intended? :-)

Gerry

Alison Powell
Alison Powell's picture

Thanks for offering to put a tutorial together Gerry! I did not mean to give you more to do but certainly appreciate any tips, ideas etc.

Gene- the external drive is separate from the 3TB drive. It's a small, pocket-sized thing I can take with me if I travel anywhere. I have extremely limited space on my laptop so I try not to store anything there. My ideal plan would be to have the catalog on that portable drive (where it is now), back-up on the 3TB drive and then also a OneDrive/Cloud back-up.

I've got the same internet concerns as you which has limited what I've tried to do. Copying large files is excruciatingly slow and just impractical. Hopefully that will change in the future!

I did not think about Windows backup services and I will try to find out exactly what it might be covering.

Thanks all- I really appreciate all the input!

Alison

Bill Shaw
Bill Shaw's picture

 

My 2 cents.

 

All my photos are on a portable 4 TB USB drive so that if I want to I can connect to my laptop.

 

Once a week I have an automated backup script to copy the Originals on the portable drive to an internal drive on my desktop.  So the backup drive is internal hard drive while the external drive is source for LR.  Remember just having the Catalog file does not get you the photos.

 

When importing from a memory card, I do this via LR like Gerry and let LR copy to folders.  Just remember to point LR to where you want it if you are not using the default by date folder structure. It seems like a pain but it’s totally worth it.  I have LR automatically apply keywords at the time of import.

 

Out of the box LR will place photos on your destination drive organized by date.  I was convinced by some internet 'experts' that this was bad because how can you know what you took by date.  This would be true if you never used keyword tags! If I could go back in time I would tell myself to use the default by date and add keyword tags.

 

In any case, be sure to add meaningful keywords tags. This is one of the most powerful aspects of LR since it is using a DB to help you find and organize.  Not only can you search by keywords but also by metadata.  By camera, by lens

 

Another powerful tool in LR is 'Collections'.  It's worth getting familiar with how they work.  'Smart Collection' can allow you to find photos using metadata keyword tags etc.  One of my 'Smart Collections' is named 'This month's photo'. It automatically gathers all photos in a view that were taken in the last 31 days.

 

Gene Runion
Gene Runion's picture

A quick note about disk space and LR's backup. (THIS IS USUALLY A BIG HELP WITH USERS OF LAPTOPS) When LR does its catalog backup when you exit LR, a *new and additional* backup file is created. Since each backup process creates a new file and if you frequently allow LR to do its backup (as you should) a lot of disk space will be quickly consumed. The remedy is simply manually deleting extra backups. The location of the backups is revealed and can be changed in the window that pops up when you exit LR and asks if you want to do a backup. Take note of the backup location in this pop up window and then use Windows Explorer or Finder on the Mac to navigate to that location and have a look. You should see many folders with a name like "2021-06-20 2248" which is the date and time of the backup. In each of these folders will be just one file with a name of [name of your catalog].lcrat.zip. I keep the oldest, one from each year, and two recent ones and delete the rest. There is no reason why you can't delete them all. Deleting all but the last couple makes good sense. Deleting the many backups of the catalog has solved many disk space problems. For good measure I also make my own separate backup of the catalog but not an accumulation of backups.

Gerry Bishop
Gerry Bishop's picture

Really good advice from both Bill and Gene. Thanks to you both!