Can I just throw away old Lightroom Catalog backups?

Question

My hard disk is getting full so I want to remover things I don't need. It seems to me that the only catalog backup I would need to save is the last one created. I use the default 'pictures' folder that Lightroom defaults to for catalog backups which is fine with me. Can I safely just delete old catalog backups as Lightroom saves them every time I make a backup, which is often, so now I have over 40 GB of catalog backups I want to dump most of but thought I would be wise to check here first before doing anything damaging. I have backups of all of the catalog backus saved to an external drive just in case... What are you thoughts and best practice for this?

TIA, Ken

drtonyb · Accepted Answer

@Ken Nielsen

Catalog backups are for you. Lightroom Classic doesn't need them as such, but you might. With catalog upgrades happening regularly, older backups become somewhat redundant. If you have the last backup on your hard drive and some previous backups on an external drive, I would think that is more than sufficient for disaster recovery. So my answer would be no, there are no real issues in culling older backups from your hard drive to make a bit of extra space.

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