Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: Ellis Vener on August 20, 2012, 12:48:38 pm

Title: What to do with old Lightroom catalog backups?
Post by: Ellis Vener on August 20, 2012, 12:48:38 pm

Is there any point in keeping them or is it safe to delete them? By "old" I mean older than two months.

Title: Re: What to do with old Lightroom catalog backups?
Post by: Malco on August 20, 2012, 01:53:45 pm

I never keep more than 5.

Title: Re: What to do with old Lightroom catalog backups?
Post by: john beardsworth on August 20, 2012, 02:13:35 pm

Make sure they're backed up somewhere, just in case, but beyond that there's no use keeping them.

Title: Re: What to do with old Lightroom catalog backups?
Post by: Kirk Gittings on August 20, 2012, 02:20:44 pm

Donate them to Goodwill..........

Title: Re: What to do with old Lightroom catalog backups?
Post by: howardm on August 20, 2012, 02:39:03 pm

Honestly, that should be considered an LR shortcoming.  It shouldn't be making backups open-ended like that.  There should be a pref to keep <N> backups and/or some time based value.

Title: Re: What to do with old Lightroom catalog backups?
Post by: wolfnowl on August 20, 2012, 02:46:15 pm

Ellis:  This might be of use: Deleting Old Lightroom Backups (http://www.wolfnowl.com/2010/05/deleting-old-lightroom-backups/)

Mike.

Title: Re: What to do with old Lightroom catalog backups?
Post by: john beardsworth on August 20, 2012, 03:18:03 pm

And see http://photographers-toolbox.com/products/mdawson/tpglrbackup/

Title: Re: What to do with old Lightroom catalog backups?
Post by: Ellis Vener on August 20, 2012, 04:14:13 pm

Thanks for confirming what I already thought. Much obliged. John I'll check out the LR Backup plug-in shortly.

Title: Re: What to do with old Lightroom catalog backups?
Post by: Alan Goldhammer on August 20, 2012, 06:29:11 pm

LOL!  When I first configured LR2 several years ago, I wasn't paying good attention to how I did things and I had files all over the place.  Of course I was paranoid to delete anything for fear that I would lose something in the process.  A couple of months ago when I upgraded to LR 4, I bit the bullet and managed to get everything relocated into a sensible file structure (Win7) and it wasn't as hard as I thought.  I backed up all the old catalogs and other stuff to an external drive before deleting things and restarting LR to make sure that everything works well.  The only fault that I can find with LR is that the backup system within the software should be easier to manage.  I'll have to check out the link that John provided.

Title: Re: What to do with old Lightroom catalog backups?
Post by: sbay on August 20, 2012, 09:25:40 pm

Once or twice I've managed to overwrite the meta-data on some of my pictures by accident in a copy-paste error (e.g., some travel location was captioned as a banana slug). Having an old backup of the catalog could help recover this when you finally notice it. BTW I think this happened when I was using IMatch not LR, but still something I worry about.