Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: Robert Boire on August 31, 2017, 09:53:15 am
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Hi,
A minor, but annoying problem...
I have my Catalog backup preference set for 'Once a week, when existing Lightroom'. Nevertheless, LR prompts me for a backup EVERY time I exist, no matter how long it been.
Also I do not seem to be able to retain certain settings when I exit, such as the background color in Develop.
Any thoughts from anybody?
THanks
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Sometimes weird behavior is corrected/cured by resetting the preferences.
Reset Procedure:
1. Close Lightroom.
2. Hold down [Alt/Opt]+[Shift] while restarting Lightroom.
3. Overwrite the Preferences when prompted by the dialog.
4. Close Lightroom.
5. Restart Lightroom.
Does the behavior continue after resetting the preferences?
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I find that entire LR backup a waste of time. I keep it off. I backup EVERYTHING including images, presets, profiles etc. LR can't do that. The idea that it's only backing up it's catalog doesn't seem at all useful to me. Backup everything!
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+1
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+1 again...
Early on---Lightroom 1 and 2 days---I relied on Apple Time Machine to backup the entire computer, which of course would include the Lightroom catalog. Later, with a richer, more luxuriant atmosphere of external drives, I started allowing Lightroom to do its backup thing into a designated spot on an external drive.
Now, in modern times I'm back to relying on the Time Machine(thank you, Jobsy...for making it so easy and reliable).
Why does this backstory matter?
The only time I ever goofed and deleted a Lightroom Catalog...and therefore had to replace it from a backup... was in the early days, and the Time Machine replaced it instantly and flawlessly.
Case closed.
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For those of us without Macs or "Time Machine" there are pretty good backup systems available for Windows. I take a 'belt and suspenders' approach. I have LR do it's catalog backup every time I quit LR, and in addition I have multiple automatic backups of all raw files and anything else important using Second Copy.
I would never rely completely on LR's own backup.
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I've been using this Lr plugin for years to backup all things Lr to an external drive.
https://photographers-toolbox.com/products/mdawson/tpglrbackup/
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The most important functions of LR backup are integrity check and catalogue optimization. These are not performed if you just backup it with an external tool.
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You're absolutely correct. The "catalog" is actually a SQLlite database not simply a flat file.
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I've been using this Lr plugin for years to backup all things Lr to an external drive.
https://photographers-toolbox.com/products/mdawson/tpglrbackup/ (https://photographers-toolbox.com/products/mdawson/tpglrbackup/)
Oh, don't get me started on this.. >:(
I'm still sore that LR6/2015 started forcing zipped bakups. I also paid for that plugin, and now all it does is backup the appdata directory. It was nice having it zip the backups in the background, while still being able to use LR.
It also seems to be abandonware, not even able to rename the catalog backup to it's standardized non-directory format.
I get around this though by using a Directory Opus script button to both rename to a standardized non-directory format, as well as recompress them using 7-zip-Zstandard's Zstandard codec, for MUCH better compression and very quickly too -- from a ~280mb zip to an ~80mb 7zip, using level 17. Still requires manual intervention though.
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Like others, I backup Catalog, Images, Presets - everything - via SuperDuper in my case.
I have wondered about the anatomy of the Catalog File when backing up: If so much as a single change is made to my main catalog (>200K images, 38GB catalog file size), SuperDuper sees the entire catalog file as having changed, and the backup requires the time one would expect to backup up 37GB of data. Mind you, an edit as modest as changing a single keyword for one image out of 200,000 images, causes the backup software to treat the entire catalog file as newly changed: 37BG of data is seen as having been altered.
Knowing nothing about file architecture, I'll ask if there is an alternative to this sort of file handling, or file structure, such that future versions of the LR Catalog could bee seen differently? Could there ever be a catalog file where a backup process would see only components of that file as having been altered, and therefore offer much quicker backup process?
John Caldwell