Kens Photoshop Blog

Let’s get one thing straight. Lightroom does NOT backup your photos when you do the scheduled backups, only the Lightroom database, thumbnails, develop changes and so on. You have to backup your photos yourself.

The easiest way to backup your photos in Adobe Lightroom is to use the Export function.

First setup Lightroom to backup your catalog on a schedule (Edit/catalog Settings/General Tab), say once a month.

Now hit the export button.

Enter the following settings:

Export to: Specific folder (You will change this every time)
Put in subfolder: No
Add to this catalog: None
Stack with original: No
Existing files: Ask what to do
Filenaming/Template: Filename
Custom text: None
File settings/Format: Original

The rest of the settings will now be greyed out since they are not used when exporting originals.

Let’s create a backup preset so you don’t have to enter all this stuff everytime. Click the “Add” button and enter BACKUP as the preset name.

Let’s create a simple and easy to use (And remember) backup strategy.

You need at least 2 drives, preferrably external ones so you can easily swap one if it goes bad.

Now just wait until the next time Lightroom tells you it’s going to backup the database.

Now since this is the first time you backup using this setup, on the first of your backup disks, create a folder called “0001″ and tell Lightroom to put the catalog database into a subfolder in the “0001″ folder called: Catalog

After Lightroom is done with the catalog backup go to the top folder of where you store your images, now hit control+a to select everything.

Hit the export button.

Select your BACKUP preset and change the folder to backup into to: 0001/photos (Create the “photos” folder inside the 0001 folder.

The next time you are prompted to do a Lightroom database backup do this same as above, but create a folder names 0002 on the second backup drive and so on every time.

After a while these backup starts to fill up your backup drives, so just delete the earlier backup folders to create more room.

This setup is very easy to use and allows you to add more backup disks. When disaster strikes, just locate the highest numbered backup folder on whatever drive and use that to restore from.

Someone will probably say “Why don’t you just copy the folder where the photos are stored using the OS file manager or some backup program, much easier or use RAID/Drobos.” Well yeah, but when you export originals, Lightroom will generate xmp sidecar files containing the settings for each photo, another nice thing if you want to view them using another viewer, like Bridge, or if you want to quickly locate photos to import into another Catalog you can locate the images using bridge/acdsee pro for example without the need to import them first, something Lightroom will not let you do. Here’s to hoping that Lightroom as the great DAM is it will get a proper backup feature instead of just half assed backing up the database.

Secondly, RAID/Drobos is not a backup solution and is a bad idea. You can have a mirrored set of drives, but what if a virus fucks up your files? Yeah have fun with all the mirrored copies of those files, all just as fucked as the originals, maybe if they had versioning it would be usefull. I could harp on about why but a simple google search will tell the story much better. Multiple external drives is much better and cheaper and allows you to easily store one drive offsite.

If you want to automate all this and don’t care about the sidecar files and will only be using Lightroom, I suggest you get a sync backup program. My favorite is SyncBack Pro, it is by far the best I have tried. SyncBack Pro can be scheduled and has versioning and file verification. It can be used as a regular backup program as well as sync. It can sync when devices such as Flashcards are detected. It can even be set to watch folders and backup as soon as any change is made to any file in the watched folder, couple this with versioning and every single change to your photos will be backed up and new versions created allowing you to go back and pull out a later version. This does use lots of space, especially if you want to keep many days of older versions. My only gripe with SyncBack Pro and allmost all other backup programs is no support for Delta Backups. Delta backup scans individual files for changes, determines what bits are changed and then merges these changes back into the backup copy instead of just copying the whole file. Delta Backups is especially great when doing backups over a network. If you are not backing up huge files over a network lack of delta backup is no big deal, just something to keep in mind.

Small update: If you will be using a backup program like SyncBack Pro to backup your photos from Lightroom and want to have sidecar files, you can do a select all from the top folder where you store your images and then go to “Metadata/Save Metadata to file” that will write the sidecar files. It’s an option, but I don’t like backup strategies that relies on user discipline as it’s bound to fail.