Back up Mac with Time Machine-lightroom

[melissaw222]

I am running out of space on my Mac, I backed up with time mach into external drive, but does it automatically back up my edited pictures or do I need to do another back up and create a folder in lightroom? Thank you

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

You shouldn't need additional backups, the one created by Time Machine should be fine.

However, you need to make backups of your catalog file as well as the photos. You need to check to make sure this is happening. THe preferred way to do this is to use the built-in Lightroom catalog backup method, and make sure this backup is set to be stored on the external drive, and performs the test of integrity check.

[Just Shoot Me]

LR never changes the original image. Time Machine is backing up your complete hard drive which should include your images, that is "IF" your images are stored on the internal drive of your Mac.

No images are ever inside LR. LR is a Database program that References your images from where they are stored on your hard drive into the LR catalog file, a Database file.

IMHO what you should do and or have.

1) At least one complete backup copy of all your images on an external drive.

2) Allow LR to do Auto Backups of the LR catalog file once a week (which is the default setting for LR backups).

3) A Time Machine backup of the complete hard drive on a second, another, different, external drive than what your images are backed up to.

[cmgap]

You may find Julienne Kost' blog on backup strategies helpful. Even though this is labeled Lr 5 - it is still appropriate for Lr CC.

Video Tutorial – Lightroom 5 Backup Strategies « Julieanne Kost's Blog

[seamuswarren]

Many thanks for the link to Kost's tutorial.

(I feel as though Kost is an old friend - an online presence in my life for twenty years like "Lynda" was.)

Not sure how relevant the version is, but for what it's worth I am using the non-subscription version of LR 6.9.

Regarding Kost's "Presets" segment, I selected a little checkbox that appears to add the LR Presets to the backup catalogue folder within the "PICTURES" folder on Macintosh HD.

For now, my iPhone images reside on the iMac's internal drive along with a few exported LR images and the applications. The iPhone images are backed up to the cloud - and I presume - to the Time Machine backup location, though I need to look into this assumption as I seem to recall excluding Photos from Time Machine at one point, though I cannot see Photos in the list of excluded folders.

The images imported into Lightroom reside on a dedicated external hard drive connected to the iMac and it is my sincere hope this external drive is considered a part of my system as far as Time Machine is concerned. I should backup this dedicated external drive I suppose in a similar fashion to that described in Kost's tutorial - to a mirror drive or similar.

The Time Machine backups reside on a network drive partition larger than the combined size of the aforementioned.

Edit:

This article appears to resolve my Time Machine query: "Fortunately, Time Machine can back up any locally connected drive, although Apple configures it by default to exclude external drives."