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amyj6072284
amyj6072284
Participating Frequently
February 23, 2022
Question

Catalog saved on laptop & external hard drive. Is it OK to delete from laptop?

  • February 23, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 689 views

Hi everyone,

 

I really need some advice. My laptop has completely run out of space and I need to delete my Lightroom catalog.

 

All of the photos are saved on my external harddrive and Lightroom automatically saved a copy of my catalog on the drive as well. However, it also saves the catalog directly to my laptop. 

 

If I delete this, will I risk potentially deleting my catalog entirely?

 

Thanks for your help!

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

dj_paige
dj_paige
Legend
February 23, 2022

Lightroom automatically saved a copy of my catalog on the drive as well

 

Lightroom Classic does not do this. Perhaps you meant it made a backup of your catalog file on the external drive?

 

If you really want to put the catalog on the external drive, use your operating system to copy the entire folder containing your catalog file to the new drive, and then open LrC from there. And then, you can delete the catalog from the laptop hard drive. However, then your backups must go to yet a different disk. (Why? because backups on the same disk as the working catalog are not backups; if the disk crashes, you now have zero copies of your catalog file and I'm guessing you won't be happy about that)

    amyj6072284
    amyj6072284Author
    Participating Frequently
    February 23, 2022

    hey, thanks for your response!

     

    i've just looked and the catalog is saved to the pictures on the laptop. but there is also a lightroom backup on my external harddrive (where all of the photos are stored and where lightroom pulls my photos from). It seems to do this automatically? 

     

    what would you recommend doing? saving my catalog on two separate drives?

     

    this is what it looks like on my laptop:

     

     

    dj_paige
    dj_paige
    Legend
    February 23, 2022

    Backups are saved to the external drive automatically if you turn that option on (which you appear to have done).

     

    I don't really know what you are getting at with this question: what would you recommend doing? saving my catalog on two separate drives?

     

    I previously recommended copying the entire folder that contains your catalog from the laptop to the external drive, and that remains my recommendation. Then you can delete this entire folder from the laptop.


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