BACKING UP
LIGHTROOM
TO THE CLOUD
As a photographer, I shoot and keep a LOT of shots, somewhere
around 200,000 digital images, dating back to early 2000. Like
most photographers, I store them on external hard drives - the
scarey part of that solution is that hard drives FAIL. In fact, in
2014, Seagate’s 3TB drives (a very popular model) had a failure
rate of nearly 45%! Because of that, I have preached a triple
backup workflow since the beginning: one local, one taken offsite and one in the cloud.
Of course there are ways to recover the lost information,
but these services often cost a lot of money and you are not As you can see, this window shows you where your catalog
guaranteed to recover everything. Don’t rely on that.
is stored (I’ll talk about it a little later) and the frequency of
your backup.
So the question is “How do I back up all my images and my
Lightroom catalog?”. I’ll explain below how I do it and what In the Backup dropdown, choose one of the options and click
services I use, but as I mentioned earlier, I really want to stress Save. I personally recommend “Once a day” or “Every time
the importance of having an efficient backup plan. Don’t ignore Lightroom exits“. This might seem overkill but you always
it and do it now if you don’t have backups of your work.
have the option to skip the backup if you haven’t made any
In this article I will be focusing only on backing up Lightroom
in the cloud (online) and I’ll assume you already do a good
job of backing up your images on multiple HDDs. Don’t keep
everything in one single location. So let’s jump in and start by
taking the easiest first step: backing up your Lightroom catalog
with the provided tools inside the software.
significant changes anyway. In any case, NEVER choose
“Never”!
Now, we’ll need to help Lightroom decide where to put those
backups. It seems that there’s no other way to do this than to
exit Lightroom. Once you try to exit, you’ll have this window
pop-up:
Backing up your Lightroom catalog
First question: what is a catalog (.lrcat files)? Don’t confuse an
LR catalog with “the entire collection of images”. They are two
separate items!
A catalog is basically a database of your images, created by
Lightroom, that contains all the changes you’ve applied to your
photos, such as metadata, flags, stars, attributes, develop
settings, etc. If you’ve spent hours tagging and editing your
photos, all the edits and tags will be saved in the catalog.
See? I told you that you have the option to skip.
It is VERY IMPORTANT to understand that a catalog DOES
NOT contain your images. They are stored in a location you’ve
specified and Lightroom just creates a database of previews so
you could work on your photos in a non-destructive way.
You’ll probably notice on your computer that the “Backup
Folder:” is the same as where your catalog resides, which
is pretty stupid of Lightroom. Never put your backups in the
same location as your original catalog. It defeats the whole
purpose.
The first thing to do is allow Lightroom to backup your catalog
regularly. To do this, go to “Catalog Settings” (Edit > Catalog Click on “Choose” and decide where you want to put your
Settings for Windows or Lightroom > Catalog Settings for Mac backups.
OS).
Now since we’re talking about backing up in the Cloud, this
is where different services come in handy. There’s a huge
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NM CliQ Magazine | March 2016