> On Nov 8, 2014, at 7:05 PM, Godfrey DiGiorgi <[email protected]> wrote: > > The Lightroom's simplistic internal backup system does nothing more than make > a copy of the .LRCAT file at the scheduled times into a specified directory. > By default, the specified directory is a sub-folder of the catalog folder. > For example, if the catalog folder is named MyWork, by default the backup > directory will be > MyWork/Backups > and the individual backups will be in date-named subfolders there, like this: > MyWork/Backups/2014-11-01 1116/MyWork.LRCAT > MyWork/Backups/2014-11-02 1205/MyWork.LRCAT > > Each of the catalogs is complete as of the time of its writing, so every > single one of them contains the entire history of all the editing done on > every image file. It stands to reason that, given the above example, the > catalog copied at "2014-11-02 1205" will contain a bit more information than > the catalog copied at "2014-11-01 1116", not less, so saving "2014-11-01 > 1116" will recover no more changes than "2014-11-02 1205" should you need to > use the backup. > > So the right things to do are: > a) specify a location for the backup catalogs on your external drive, and > b) periodically prune down the backup catalogs to just the last one to save > space on the external drive. You do this outside of Lightroom in the Finder > (on OS X) and in the File Manager (on Windows). > > I have my Lightroom catalogs set to create a backup once a day. Every week or > so, I go into my external drive where I have it write the backups and delete > all but the last one for each catalog. (Note the plural: My usual workflow is > based on two catalogs … one for "work in progress" and one for "completed > projects" … and I create small catalogs from the master "work in progress" > catalog every so often when I'm doing a project or work for a client. If you > work in a one catalog workflow, you'll only need to manage backups for one > catalog.)
Thanks for the explanation, Godfrey. Very helpful, about both how catalogs are created and what they consist of and about the advantages of smaller catalogs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric Weir Decatur, GA USA [email protected] "Our world is a human world." - Hilary Putnam -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
