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Backup Lightroom

New Here ,
Jan 04, 2021 Jan 04, 2021

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Why does making a backup in Lightroom so long. Sometimes about 10 minutes. And that Every day.

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Community Expert ,
Jan 04, 2021 Jan 04, 2021

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I

m going to assume you mean Lightroom Classic, the desktop-based version, and not Lightroom, the cloud-based version. I'll move this post to that forum as well.

 

You can control whether it is every day or not via Edit > Catalog Settings and choosing the backup frequency.

 

As to why it takes so long, that could depend on where the catalog is located, and where the backup is located. Are the respective locations on fast hard drives? Are you making a backup to the same hard drive as your catalog? (That's a no-no, but it could cause the disk to thrash itself heavily and slow things a lot, since it's reading from and writing to the same drive).

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New Here ,
Jan 05, 2021 Jan 05, 2021

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I don't know where Lightroom places the backup. I never chose a location. Lightroom does that.

I presume Adobe is smart enoiugh to divide the standard locations from catalog and backup

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Community Expert ,
Jan 05, 2021 Jan 05, 2021

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Lightroom Classic lets you specify where the backup is stored, but the option is hard to discover because it’s visible only at backup time, as shown below. Next time it backs up, make a note of the Backup Folder path shown in the Back Up Catalog dialog box, and if you want it stored somewhere else, click Choose.

 

Lightroom-Classic-Back-Up-Catalog-dialog-box.png

 

Lightroom Classic does not automatically prune backups over time, so you should periodically be going into that Backup Folder and deleting older backups you don’t want, because a lot of catalog backups can occupy a large amount of storage space. Over time I end up deleting all except one per month except for the most recent month.

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Community Expert ,
Jan 05, 2021 Jan 05, 2021

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How many pictures do you have inside your catalog and what's the file size?

My System: Intel i7-8700K - 64GB RAM - NVidia Geforce RTX 3060 - Windows 10 Pro 22H2 -- LR-Classic 13.2 - Photoshop 25.5 - Nik Collection 6.8 - Topaz Photo AI 2

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New Here ,
Jan 05, 2021 Jan 05, 2021

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About 32200 pictures with filesizes from 17 - 25 MB

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Community Expert ,
Jan 06, 2021 Jan 06, 2021

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I think Axel means the file size of the catalog file. Images are not stored inside the catalog, so the average image size is pretty irrelevant for a catalog backup.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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New Here ,
Jan 12, 2021 Jan 12, 2021

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The backup is about 600 MB

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Community Expert ,
Jan 05, 2021 Jan 05, 2021

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When Lightroom Classic makes a catalog backup, it first verifies the catalog structure, then creates the backup and zips it and then optimizes the current catalog. That can take some time for a large catalog. My catalog contains 200,000 images and a backup does indeed take somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes (never really timed it).

 

If you want to make a quick backup so you can shut down your computer, then you can uncheck the verify and optimize steps in the backup dialog. Don't do this every time (you may backup a corrupted catalog), but it won't harm to do it once in a while.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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