Backing Up and Restoring Catalog in PSE 2021

Good Evening All,

 

I have all of my photo and video files (about 1.7 TB total) on a 5 TB external Seagate drive, mainly because my laptop's harddrive is only 512 GB in size. I would like to backup the catalog, but I was wondering how best to do that. My plan is to backup just the catalog to a second, external drive (2 TB). The photos and videos will continue to be located on the 5 TB external drive. Is such a catalog only backup sufficent to restore the catalog with all tags intact while using the original photos and videos on the 5 GB external drive? Will the photos and videos remain connected in the catalog?

 

Thanks.

 

Jon

By @Jrdnole1986

Jon,

Let's start by distinguishing between the catalog which is a folder containing the main database, accessory files and thumbnails and on the other hand, your library which is the files folders you have stored on the 5 TB external drive.

You don't tell where your catalog folder is located. It may be in the default (hidden) location on your main drive or on a 'custom' location, generally when you have moved to another computer or drive with a full backup followed by a restore.

The catalog location is to be found from the Help > System Info menu of the organizer.

You can move or copy the whole catalog folder where you like and its contents will not change. It will always point to the location of the files. But if you change the locations of the files by moving them externally to a new drive or location, the catalog will still point to the original location and all your files will be shown as 'missing' or 'disconnected'.

So, to be safe, you need both a backup (copy) of your catalog folder and a copy of your photo files tree. That can be done in many ways but that only lets you restore your saved files on the original drive if you need to. If you want to restore on a new computer or drive after a disaster, only the full backup and restore process from the organizer takes care to update each photo file location to its new place on the new drive.

So, if you periodically do full backup and restores, your concern seem to be able to protect you against loss or corruption of the data in your catalog, assuming the original photo files are still safe and available on their original support.

You are free to store your catalog on the original location on the main drive or elsewhere, generally beside the master folder of your photo folders.

- original location (hidden) : best performance, but not critical

- beside the photo library on an external drive in 'custom' location: you can share it with another computer with PSE just by plugging the external drive in the other computer

- in other locations, external drives, on Cloud locations (DropBox, OneDrive...)

Also note that PSE2021 now has the option to automatically save the catalog folder when you exit the organizer. The folder is saved minus the big thumbnail cache which can be recreated automatically. It's fast and highly recommended after each big editing session.

Otherwise, with any PSE version, remember you can always copy or move catalog folders from your Explorer.