Comments on: 10 More Things I Would Tell a New Lightroom User: #2

By: Essential Lightroom Classic Maintenance Tasks - Lightroom Killer Tips

Essential Lightroom Classic Maintenance Tasks - Lightroom Killer Tips — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 17:35:14 +0000

[…] With your catalog located, possibly renamed, and set as the default, you want to ensure that all of the work you do in Lightroom Classic is also backed up with an integrity check on a regular basis. Sure, you are probably using some sort of full system backup, and I applaud you for that. But there is a good reason to use the built in catalog back up function too, which is that it saves a new copy of your catalog up to that point in time, then compresses it into a zip file to reduce size. Should your working catalog become corrupted or if you suffer a drive failure you’ll have a series of recent catalogs to fall back on. However, a far more likely scenario is that you’ll do some sort of self-inflicted injury on your catalog (like delete a saved book collection, or accidentally remove a folder from the catalog and lose all edits on those photos, or some other own goal), and by having a recent backup copy of your catalog, you can just shrug it off and get the important information from the most recent backup. So, go ahead and set up the automated catalog backup function. […]

By: Rob Sylvan

Rob Sylvan — Fri, 04 Sep 2015 00:30:14 +0000

In reply to marco. Happy to help!

By: Rob Sylvan

Rob Sylvan — Fri, 04 Sep 2015 00:29:50 +0000

In reply to Susan Scharenberg. Glad to hear it! :)

By: marco

marco — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 16:08:09 +0000

In reply to Rob Sylvan.

Rob ! Thankyou soooooo much !
I can’t explain how useful you suggestion has been !
Everything works fine now and I’m really happy.
Thank you !
marco

By: Rob Sylvan

Rob Sylvan — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 12:59:13 +0000

In reply to Paul C. You are not alone in wishing there was a cancel or return to editing button on the catalog backup dialog. Or perhaps if there was a way to manually run a backup without shutting down.

By: Susan Scharenberg

Susan Scharenberg — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 12:01:21 +0000

Very helpful and informative, Rob. Your writing style makes the material very accessible to those with less-than-deep technical knowledge. Looking forward to more!

By: Rob Sylvan

Rob Sylvan — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 16:25:42 +0000

In reply to marco.

Hi Marco,

I’m sure you didn’t move it there. My guess is that it was due to that Default Catalog setting I covered in yesterday’s tip (that is why I made it the Number 1 tip), so go back and make sure you change that setting.

To move your catalog back to your main drive, I’d start by going to your Pictures/Lightroom folder and my guess is you are going to see an old catalog (and associated preview cache) from right before that Default Catalog setting shunted you over to your backup folder. That one is most likely out of date and no longer useful (you’ll have to figure that out), so I would move all of those files out of that folder and put them in a safe place for later (or just delete them and move on).

Then, with Lightroom closed, use your file browser of choice to *copy* your actual working catalog (and its associated preview caches) from the backup location to the Pictures/Lightroom folder. Once the copy operation is complete, double-click the catalog file to open it into Lightroom and verify all is well.

Then go back to my first tip and make sure your Default Catalog setting is set correctly so that this doesn’t happen again.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 15:33:26 +0000

In reply to marco. Just move the catalog from one disk to another, open lightroom, the open the catalog from the new location.

By: marco

marco — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 15:16:57 +0000

Hy Rob, great article !
I’ve got a question for you : I back up lightroom catalog in an external hard drive, but how can I choose where to save the main catalog ? It actually is located in the same hard disk with the back up ( I don’t really remember how I managed to move it there !! ) but I want it to go back to the computer hard drive.
Thanks in advance
Marco
Italy

By: Paul C

Paul C — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 15:07:24 +0000

Thanks Rob – how delighted I was when the LRCC backups became zipped! I back-up using the “Once-a-day” facility; Zipping saved tons of space as my catalog became several Gb. I tended to cull regularly to all but the latest 3, though now I often find I have 20 or 30 to delete as the space is not chewed up as quickly. This backup is so easy and requires so little thought that I have it, as you say, in addition to any other backup. I HAVE had a corrupt database and this backup was my life-saver – It played up a bit at first until I realised that if I deleted all the preview files everything went smoothly and LR just generated a load more

If I could change something, though, I would love for Adobe to also have a “return to editing” button on the shut-down dialog.

I confess that to speed up the backup I occasionally used to delete all my history steps for images I knew I will not re-edit or that had eventually gone through PS. The first time I did this my backup went from 3Gb to 750Mb which is a substantial saver, but not as good as the zipped version which is even smaller.Adobe have made lots of really valuable changes in recent years, even the import “create a second copy” has improved to an easy form where, when restoring the database from a backup, the missing recent files can easily be identified and re-imported.