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Author Topic: Real Lightroom DB Backups  (Read 1577 times)

Carl Dahlke

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Real Lightroom DB Backups
« on: November 10, 2007, 08:40:15 pm »

A prefactory remark - the automatic backup that Lightroom offers is useless in guarding against hard disk failures since it doesn't allow you to specify the disk to which the library is backed up - and since I've had 4 hard disk failures in the last 10 year I consider a database that isn't backed up to at least two separate hard disks (so that I have 3 copies) to be ephemeral at best. In fact, it's not worth putting in the massive amount of work that it takes to use Lightroom as my main image catalog unless I can back a Lightroom library up onto a different hard drive than the one that Lightroom goes to by default.

Also as a side note - I never import images into the Lightroom library - I always leave them external to Lightroom.

I thought I could back up a Lightroom library by copying the entire library folder structure from one disk to another.  This appeared to work fine.  I just closed the old library and opened the copied version.  However, the first time the automatic backup kicked in on the copied library, Lightroom told me it couldn't back the library up (because the disk on which the library originally resided was off line).  So clearly Lightroom embeds knowledge about the disk on which it was running in the library itself.

So how does one go about really backing up a library from one disk to another.  I've put several months of worth of work into Lightroom, but unless I can get a reliable library backup mechanism going whereby I can at least weekly back up the library from one disk to another I think I'll go back to using Excell to catalog my images.  I know for certain that without backup to separate disks I will eventually lose all my work.

It would be very nice if there were an automatic incremental backup mechanism, but I'd settle for complete copy at this time.
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michael

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Real Lightroom DB Backups
« Reply #1 on: November 10, 2007, 09:05:01 pm »

Simply do a FILE / EXPORT AS CATALOGUE.

This also gives you the option of including the raw files and previews if you wish. You can point it to any online drive.

Michael
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