Copy link to clipboard
Copied
Why does making a backup in Lightroom so long. Sometimes about 10 minutes. And that Every day.
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
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).
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
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
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
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 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.
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
How many pictures do you have inside your catalog and what's the file size?
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
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.
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
The backup is about 600 MB
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
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.