QuestionHow are y'all backing up your catalog these days?

Had a scare last week. Lightroom catalog wouldn't open after the power dropped out while I was in the middle of an import, and for about twenty minutes I figured I'd lost three years of edits. Turned out the automatic catalog backup had a copy from the day before, so no harm done, but it got me thinking.

Current setup FWIW: raws on a 4TB external, catalog on the laptop, and Lightroom backs the catalog up weekly to that same external drive. Which I now realize means if that one drive goes, everything goes. Raws are around 1.6TB, mostly D850 and Z8 files of birds that all look the same to my wife.

What's a sensible setup for a retired fella who isn't going to run a server? Cloud, a second drive at my daughter's, both? IMHO the 3-2-1 thing sounds great right up until you try to actually do it.

• Walt

WaltK_AZ said:

Which I now realize means if that one drive goes, everything goes.

Yep. Here's mine, and it's not fancy.

Cards don't get formatted until the job exists in three places. At home I have two drives that mirror each other, so if one dies the other just carries on. A third drive lives at my sister's and I swap it with a fourth once a month when I drop by for dinner, so the most I can ever lose to a fire or a break-in is a few weeks. The catalog and the delivered finals also go up to cloud storage every night, because those are the bits that would cost me clients if they vanished. Raws I don't bother putting in the cloud, too big, too slow.

Sounds like a lot, but once it's set up it's ten minutes a month and a dinner. I had a drive die on me mid-season once, years ago, and spent a very bad weekend rebuilding from cards I luckily hadn't formatted. Never again man.

Also get the catalog backups off the drive the raws are on, and test a restore at least once. Actually open the backup catalog on another machine and check the edits are there. A backup you've never restored from is a hope, not a backup.

Two more things people miss. First, Lightroom's catalog backup only covers the catalog, not your raws and not the previews, so it's not a full backup of anything, it's a backup of your edits. Make sure the raws themselves are in at least two places. Second, a mirrored pair of drives is not a backup on its own, it's redundancy. If you delete a folder by accident, the mirror deletes it too, instantly. You want at least one copy that's updated on a schedule, not in real time, so a mistake on Tuesday can still be undone from Sunday's copy.

1.6TB isn't much these days. Two drives and a cheap cloud plan will cover you for years.

Appreciate it, both of you. Ordered a second drive, and the old one goes to my daughter's in Tempe next time we visit, which gives me an excuse to visit. Testing a restore this weekend, which I expect will go great right up until it doesn't... - Walt