Video - Backing Up Lightroom
I was recently reading a question asked by some folks who were upgrading to Leopard (newest Mac OS) and they wanted to know how to back up Lightroom in case a catastrophe happened in the OS upgrade process. That sparked an idea that I’ve been wanting to cover for a while, and it affects both PC and Mac users. The topic is, “How do you back up Lightroom?” I mean, what do you do to make sure that if your computer decides to go bye-bye tomorrow, that you’re safe and can easily be back up and running with Lightroom (AND ALL of your photos AND ALL of the things that you’ve done to your photos). Personally, I’ve had about 3 laptop hard drive crashes in the last 5 or so years. Maybe I’m just hard on my laptops. Personally, I always thought it was OK to toss it across the room to a friend, but maybe I’m alone on that one 
Anyway, that little question is what brought on this week’s video. I think you’ll find it’s actually way easier then you thought to keep Lightroom and all of its managed photos backed up and ready to restore whenever you need.
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on November 10th, 2007 at 11:53 am
I back up my database each time I start Lightroom. Can I dump OLD back-up files? I have them since May when I started.
on December 1st, 2007 at 1:25 am
Very strong approach. Always backup yourself!
on December 20th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Instead of Ghost for the PC, I would strongly suggest using Acronis Trueimage, it’s a fantastic program. Better features, easy to use and twenty bucks cheaper.
I stopped using Ghost when Symantec got involved, and with TrueImage, I’ve never looked back.
on February 20th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Just an additional general tip as I have heard several stories about backups gone wrong:
If you are making a backup of your entire computer make sure to store incremental backups such that you have a backlog. Otherwise it could be dangerous to use “never” for the backup of the lightroom catalog as if it gets corrupted your backup software would just backup the corrupted catalog.
I like to be safe so I always have a few (depending on the size) catalog backups on the local disk that are then backed up externally, then I have several alternatives if something goes wrong.
on April 18th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Please continue this video regarding backing up INSIDE Lightroom. Both the photos and the catalog-database.