Lightroom Tips

The Most Asked Lightroom Question From Over 700 People

Last week I had two stops on my Lightroom 3 Live seminar tour. We hit Phoenix on Wednesday with nearly 400 people and Indianapolis on Friday with over 300. First, the crowds were great. Everyone was just so psyched about learning Lightroom in a start-to-finish day like we covered. What’s always interesting for me though, is that I get out from behind my desk at the office and find out what questions are really bugging Lightroom users out there.

This past week, one question won above the rest, hands down. Ready for it? The question was: How many backups do I have to save of the Lightroom catalog? You know, when you quit Lightroom you can set LR’s preferences to backup your catalog. By default it will do it every week or so, but you can tell it to backup every time you quit Lightroom if you want. Well, each time it backs up it saves a folder of your backup. If you’ve got a decent sized catalog, those folders can grow to take up quite a bit of space and I heard from a lot of people wondering how many of them they should save.

My answer: none. Yep. I don’t save any. In fact, I don’t use the backup feature for Lightroom. Instead, I back up my computer every night. I make a fully bootable backup using Super Duper for Mac. Acronis makes something similar for PC as well as many others. Just Google “PC Backup software” and you’ll find them. That’s it though. There’s not much more to it. (I do also have a Time Machine too so I can always go back to another day’s catalog if I wanted to.) But I have a daily backup of my entire computer so, if my Lightroom catalog ever goes bad or crashes, I’m covered. I just go to my backup drive. Not to mention if my computer ever crashes, I’m covered as well – not just Lightroom but EVERYTHING is backed up. Actually my hard drive crashed last Monday right before I left for the week and that backup came in really handy but that’s a whole other story 🙂

Anyway, that’s my report from being on the road last week teaching Lightroom. A big thanks to everyone in Phoenix and Indy for making me feel right at home. And for lot’s of “oooooo’s and ahhhhh’s” throughout the day (sorry, inside joke – you had to be there) 🙂
Seriously though, I had a ton of people come up through out the day saying that they read the blog and just wanted to say hi. If you’re in Tampa, Arlington (Dallas), or Philly then I hope you’ll try to catch one of the next seminar dates.

Share: