It’s ‘Pitch Your Outdated Backup Catalogs” Monday!

Happy Monday, everybody! Just a quickie today, but it’s kinda important — especially if you’re working on a laptop or a desktop computer where you’re constantly running out of free space.

You see that dialog above — the one that appears when you quit Lightroom, asking you if you want to make a backup copy of your catalog? Each time you see it, it asks you to make a COPY of your entire catalog. Each time you hit that ‘Back up’ it makes yet another backup copy. Sure, it compresses that backup quite a bit, but still…those backups can get really big in file size, but worse yet, after a couple of weeks, they’re so outdated that those older ones become useless anyway.

So, go see how many backups you have (you really only need one or two very recent ones).

Look inside your Lightroom folder (the one where your catalog(s) are stored and look for a folder named ‘Backups” and inside that folder, see if you don’t have a whole bunch of backups that are way out of date, just eating up hard drive space for no reason. If you don’t see a folder named ‘Backups’ that’s because you don’t have any backups (ack!) so if disaster strikes (your catalog gets corrupted), you will be starting over from scratch in Lightroom (Yikes!) So, you’ll need to start backing up your catalog right now (the backup window appears when you quit Lightroom).

NOTE: I don’t recommend that you actually back-up your catalog to the same computer you’re working on — instead back-up to the Cloud or to an external hard drive. I did a previous post called “Are you backing up your Lightroom catalog to the right place?” you might find helpful (here’s the link).

OK, so you know what to do – go trash those old outdated backups, and free up some wasted space!

We are just 19-days away from my Worldwide Photo Walk on Saturday, October 6th
Whoo hoo, it’s gettin’ close! We have already approved leaders in over 1,000 walks in cities around the world, and nearly 800 of them are already online for you to join a walk near you! To find out if there’s a walk near you, click here. 

I’m off to Rome tomorrow
I’m there for my hands-on travel photography workshop in Italy, but I’ll be posting like mad while I’m there (not really).

Have a great week everybody!

Best,

-Scott

P.S. Even though I’m not here this week, we recorded a special episode of The Grid on Friday that will air on Wednesday at its normal time. Our topic is “How to not get suckered when picking out your next camera.”