Manage Your Lightroom Classic Catalog Backups

I’ve worked with countless Lightroom Classic users in private training and it’s common for me to see people who have a large number of catalog backups. In some cases there were 100+ dating back over the span of years. Older backups aren’t very useful for an active LrC user and they take up valuable hard drive space.

Most people I worked with didn’t know how to remove these unnecessary backups so I usually ended up doing it for them. But now there is a new feature in Lightroom Classic that gives the user easy access to catalog backups and enables them to delete older backups.

Open your Catalog Settings (Mac: Lightroom > Catalog Settings, Win: Edit > Catalog Settings) and then select the Backups tab at the top. You should see a list of backups that are currently saved. To remove older backups, select them and click the Delete button. (If you click the Remove button, the catalog will be removed from the list but it will remain on the hard drive.)

Open your Catalog Settings and choose the Backups tab (Mac: Lightroom > Catalog Settings, Win: Edit > Catalog Settings)

You can use the Backups section of Catalog Settings to determine how often LrC will remind you to backup the catalog. You can also designate where your backups are stored by clicking the Choose button. Some people prefer to have their backups on a different drive than their main catalog. This makes sense because if the backups and original are on the same drive and that drive fails, both the original catalog and the backups will be lost. If you use a systemwide backup like Time Machine on a Mac, make sure it also backs up the drive these LrC catalog backups are stored on. (Never hurts to have an extra layer of backups.)

One More Thing About Catalog Backups

It is a good idea to let Lightroom Classic make periodic backups or your catalog. If you are already running a systemwide backup like Time Machine, then your main catalog should be getting backed up by that system. Even so, you should use Lightroom to do a backup. The value of this is LrC will optimize the catalog and check its integrity during the process - and possibly identify issues before they become problems. That’s why I have mine set to remind me monthly even though my entire system gets backed up daily.