Moving my catalog from my c drive to my d drive

photo7734  wrote Thank you for your response, Mr. Paige. As near as I can tell it appears that the catalog backups are kept together with the working catalog in the "Lightroom" folder so the backup problem exists currently, or am I missing something? Do all of the files and folders I identified have to be maintained in the same "Lightroom" folder or would it be possible to keep them in different locations? In answer to the second question, there is a school of thought with regard to computer builds to have a relatively small C: drive for the operating system and as little else as possible, and to have a separate larger drive to hold everything else. The thinking is that everything that you can't replace is kept on the D: drive, and you can perform a fresh install of Windows in the event of corruption without suffering loss. I was led to believe that I would only have to keep Creative Cloud on the C: drive, but LR, PS and related files could be located on the D: drive which is what I have done. I do not want the catalog and backups to be routinely piling up data, especially data I don't want to lose, on C: drive. Since my original RAW files are on D:, it seems that the catalog should be there and archived together with the images. Conventionally in such a system, backups of D: are kept on a disconnected external drive.

Backups MUST go on a different disk than the original or working copy. So that folder named Backups, and the storing of future backups, MUST go on a different disk than the original or working copy. MUST, as in, this is not optional, it is not something you can do next week or next month, it should be done immediately.

I don't know how small your C: drive is, or how much free space is on that disk, but photos can and should be on a different drive. This is what takes up most of the space. Moving the catalog itself, along with associated previews, can be done, but usually is not recommended because it will be slower on a different drive, and will only save small amounts of space. Some people have two SSDs, one for the operating system only, a second one for software and other things that need speed like the Lightroom catalog, and a regular spinning hard disk for everything else, including your photos. So please describe your current hardware drives, and how big is each and how much free space is on each.