thanks for your input guys...appreciate it...madmanchan...do you mean compressing with something like stuffit deluxe?...or does lightroom have that capability?...i haven't seen anything like that in lightroom but maybe i missed it...thanks mmcM
Francois is right ... LR does not currently contain any built-in system for compressing backup catalogs. I do what Francois does ... context-click on the backup catalog and choose Compress from the popup.
You can use Mac OS X buit-in compression utility. Just right-click (or Control + click) on your backup and choose Compress " name of your backup". A zip file will be created in the same folder.To give you some hard numbers, my 2008 catalog backup is around 165MB. Using the system compression, my backup shrinks to 16.6MB, a 10x factor. Stuffit Deluxe should offer the same kind of compression.I'm not aware of any compression capability built into Lightroom but Eric could confirm that.