P: Set Maximum # Of Catalog Backups, and Auto-Replace Oldest

I have about 100k photos, and my LR4 Catalogue is nearly 2Gb in size. I've been in the habit of backing up every time LR quits, because I do a fair bit of editing and don't want to lose recent changes if things were to go belly up. I checked the backup folder yesterday and it is over 100Gb in size, with backups stretching back to the last Ice Age... ;o)

Would it be possible to introduce an option to limit the number of backup copies. By that I mean the user could tick a box to limit the number and select how many copies of their catalogue they wish to keep. The programme would keep track of this and delete older copies automatically, or at least give the user a prompt to say "OK, bin them!"

For me the "perfect" implementation would have two aspects:

Firstly, an option to retain, for example, the latest four daily backups then, say, weekly backups of the last month, and perhaps a few monthly backups. This would give a reasonable buffer if anything did go wrong big style.

Secondly, the option to save backups and catalogue to two different locations (i.e. drives) simultaneously.

Thanks for your consideration folks, and an even bigger thank you for LR! It's awesome! 🐵

I just found out that lightroom keeps spamming my harddrive with backup databases without any limits.
That actually feels like a huge bug, but seems to be a "feature".

So here to request would be what tons of other pieces of software already do:
Make it an option to discard old backups automatically via one of two criteria:
a) discard oldest backups if total sum of backap data exceeds x megabyte
b) discard oldest backups if the get older than x days/weeks/months

Great plugin, Matt. Looking forward to the auto-replace functionality!

Hi Gavin,

Agree this would be a useful feature.

In the meantime I have written the TPG LR Backup plugin that compresses the catalog backups and can help you move them to a different HDD. The catalog backups typically compress to 10-25% of their original size so it definitely helps conserve disk space so you don't need to manually clean the files up as quickly. I will be adding a feature to manage the backups by maximum number of backups or Mb consumed by backups. ETA for that is still to be confirmed.

Matt