You can certainly turn OFF LR's lame backup catalog option.
Question: is a locked Lightroom catalog guaranteed to be in a consistent state if you subsequently need to recover it?
I
have been using the back-up catalog option on LR process exit. But I also have a script which backs up both the active catalog and the saved ones to a high-availability server every 15 minutes (and the back-up copies are then backed up to another server every hour). My rationale for using the internal LR back-up feature has been that while the program is running, the database might be in a less-than-fully recoverable state. I delete the oldest catalog back-ups every now and then (I guess I could script that, too), but at any given time they consume between 5 and 10GB of mass storage.
Am I missing something here? Is the LR back-up-catalog option providing
any potential benefit to justify the space it consumes? I haven't been able to find anything on the Adobe website(s) that explains how the program manages its dataset. Does a running instance of LR flush the database at regular intervals to insure consistency? If so, what does the "optimize catalog" option do when it is invoked?