I'll leave Greg answer your questions in detail (which I am sure I will 100% aprove). I will just discuss the backup preference.
We are generally discussing two different configs: Very large catalog with face recognition and automatic features with powerful hardware for Greg, and medium size library without face recognition nor automatic features for myself.
The difference for the duration of backup is huge. I am happy to create a backup in about 4 hours and to restore in a little less. I suppose that it would mean more than a night job for Greg.
I have always been an advocate of the organizer backup for mainly one reason. It was conceived to be able to restore both the media files and the catalog to a new computer, drive, partition or master folder while updating the file location data in the catalog. If you use your good external backup system to save both your media and your catalog folder, the restore will work without updating the location data (disk identification) in your database in the new destination.
In such a case, Lightroom offers an efficient 'reconnecting' feature, so it does not need to save the files and you need to use your external backup software. Elements has a reconnecting function which works only for a selection of subfolders, and is unable to reconnect a whole catalog.
So, my advice was to always use the organizer backup when planning a computer/disk migration, and to use it at larger intervals regularly.
Now, I have been forced to restore after a sudden failure of the external drive holding both my media library and my catalog. Big surprise ! The organizer restore failed after restoring correctly all the media files. After a 'restore complete' message, it followed by a 'preparing catalog' process wich lasted indefinitely. After closing, the restored catalog did work with NOT updated locations, still pointing to the old broken SSD external drive. I did try twice with the same result.
So, until I find what went wrong (update to Win 11 and new computer), I can no longer recommend the organizer backup choice.
Fortunately, I always "sync" my working disk to other external drives and I know how to update the catalog to the new disk location via an external sqlite feature.
I would recommend testing your own backup software to use it to restore to a new external drive to see if it is apt to move both the media and the catalog while keeping the location updated in the database of the catalog.
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