Backup files overwritten with LR3?

[Mark F]

I have LR3 set up to do a catalog backup whenever I exit. While looking for something in the Finder I noticed that only the latest backup file (.lrcat) was present. That tells me that each backup is over-writing the current file. I seem to recall that LR2 saved each .lrcat file by date. Was that changed or is there a setting I need to change to keep the old back-up files. There have been times in the past when I needed to revert to a prior catalog.

Thanks.

[Schewe]

Where are you having LR save the backup catalogs?

For me, the catalogs are being saved in the same location as the main catalog folder under a subfolder named 'Backups'. They are listed in folders based on the date of the backup.

[john beardsworth]

The backup catalogue folders are named not just with the date but with the date and time, just in case you make more than one backup a day.

Next time you close Lightroom, have a good look at where it is saving the backups. You're probably pointing Finder at the wrong folder.

[howardm]

I've never seen LR overwrite a backup.  Any version.

That is usually surprising to new users who discover they have a zillion backups and wonder where their disk space went to.

You have to manually clean them out  (there should be a 'keep <N> backup versions' pref)

[wolfnowl]

Deleting Old Lightroom Backups (Windows version, anyway)

No, never seen LR overwrite a backup, myself.

Mike.

[Mark F]

I backup to an external drive and up until now, the backups were at the very top of that drive's finder window, and in the expected format: "2011-11-17 2042" for date and time.  I just did a backup of this weekend's work and I now have 2 backup files, one from the 17th and one from today. I've searched all my drives including the trash and those files are not to be found. But at least I know they are not being overwritten.

[NikoJorj]

You have to manually clean them out  (there should be a 'keep <N> backup versions' pref)

An alternative would be to have LR compress the backup files in a zip or rar container, these files compress to 5-10% of original size (500MB-35MB for me).
It would be safer than automatically delete backups...

[Mark F]

Niko, I did not know that you could compress backup files from within LR3. How do you do that?

[NikoJorj]

Sorry to have been unclear, I was proposing that as a feature request.
That said, this can do it http://thephotogeek.com/lightroom/lr-backup/ .