51. MANAGING LIGHTROOM BACKUPS

REMEMBER THAT LIGHTROOM is your digital notebook. This notebook keeps track of the location of your pictures as well as any changes that you’ve made to them. The last thing you want to do is lose this notebook. Thankfully, Lightroom gives you the opportunity to back up your catalog so that you can go back to a previously saved version of it if you run into problems.

You can change the frequency of your catalog backups in the Catalog Settings dialog (select Lightroom > Catalog Settings from the toolbar at the top of the screen). Click on the General tab, and then select an option from the Back up catalog drop-down menu.(Figure 51.1).

The backup information is saved as an LRCAT file (Figure 51.2). This LRCAT file is the actual Lightroom notebook. There is also a Previews file that contains the thumbnails for your pictures, but it’s not really necessary for that to be backed up. If something happens to your catalog, you can always rebuild those thumbnails from the existing catalog file, so the catalog is the most important part.

In Figure 51.2, you can also see that there is a -journal and .lock file, but don’t worry about those. Those files only appear when Lightroom is open, and will disappear once you exit Lightroom.

Figure 51.1 Change the frequency of your catalog backups in the Catalog Settings dialog.

Figure 51.2 Your catalog backup is stored as an LRCAT file.

When you quit out of Lightroom, you will be asked whether you want to back up your catalog files or skip it (Figure 51.3). You also have options to optimize the catalog and test the integrity before Lightroom actually backs it up. When you see this window, I recommend that you back up your catalog. You don’t want to run into a snag later on and not have a good copy.

Your catalog backups are stored in a Backups subfolder inside the area where your actual catalog is stored, and they will be sorted according to date (Figure 51.4).

File Handling is another important section of the Catalog Settings dialog (Figure 51.5). In this section you have the option to change the Standard Preview Size that is used during import. If you want to conserve a little bit of space, you can drop to a smaller preview size than what was used previously, but the default setting will always be the resolution you need based on the monitor you have.

You can also change the Preview Quality and the length of time the 1:1 previews are kept. By default, this is set to 30 days, which is more than adequate, in my opinion. It’s always a good idea to dump these files when you don’t need them. Remember that the 1:1 previews are much larger than standard previews, so if you keep them for longer than you need to, you could clog up your computer with files that you aren’t really using. If you need to render new previews at any point in time, you can always zoom into the picture and get the files that you need.

Figure 51.3 I suggest backing up your catalog whenever you see this window.

Figure 51.4 Your catalog backups are sorted according to date.

Figure 51.5 In the File Handling tab of the Catalog Settings dialog, you can decide how Lightroom handles previews.