Killer Lightroom’s Tips for New Users #5: Trash Your Old Adobe Lightroom Catalog Backups

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Just a few weeks ago I shared a new article from new user tips series by Scott Kelby and his team that can be found on the Lightroom Killer Tips website. The series is now complete so if you want to skip ahead see the rest of the articles, just click on the link to get started.

Trash Your Old Adobe Lightroom Catalog Backups

I realized early on that every time I closed Lightroom and choose to create a backup that unlike other backup programs, the older backups were never over written.

Before I figured this out, I couldn’t figure out why my two terabyte external drive had filled up so fast. After running some diagnostics I found that I had over fifty backup copies of the Lightroom catalog! I had thought they were overwriting the older one or at least taking out the oldest and most useless ones. I mean why would ever I ever want to go back to my first backup. If I restored at that point, I would lose so much work!

So I deleted almost all of my old Adobe Lightroom backups and only kept two of the most recent backups. I backup every time I close Lightroom so that if I make a major mistake and loose files and edits that I can’t get back, I can recover and only loose work that was not backed up to the last two backups.

I also wanted to point out, if you are doing regular full/incremental backups of your hard drives to Time Capsule (Mac) or some other backup software and external hard drive system then you may not even need to backup your catalogs. Personally I would do both. For me it easier to go to where the backup catalog is stored and replace it with the current one.

In Scott Kelby’s article 10 Things I Would Tell New Lightroom Users #5: Throw Away Your Old Catalog Backups he gives his reasons why you shouldn’t save more than a handful of copies of your old Adobe Lightroom catalog backups. Make sure to check his article on this topic.