Effect of backup on the edits.

[Philip273508637hrw]

If I have all my photos on a hard drive and create a backup of all my photos on a different hard drive, will I be able to just connect any of the two hard drives to my computer and have the same edits on the photos? Or: If I lose my original hard drive and connect my backup hard drive (with the same photos) to the same computer, are all my edits gonna be there?  This should be the case because edits are stored locally on my computer, right?

Thanks,

Philip

[Sameer K]

Welcome to the Lightroom Community. I'll help you figure this out.

What version of Lightroom & the operating system are you working on? The workflow is different for Lightroom desktop & Lightroom Classic.

If you're working on Lightroom Classic, it (by default) stores the edits in the catalog. Check the response by @JP Hess  in this thread: https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-discussions/how-to-sync-edits-from-folder-on-one-ha...

If you're working on Adobe Lightroom, the target location for full-size raw images & edits is cloud storage. You can configure Lightroom to store the originals & copies to desired external drives: https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/using/preferences.html

Let me know if this helps. Thanks!
Sameer K

[Philip273508637hrw]

Thanks for the fast reply. I'm working on Adobe Lightroom. However, my question is if my target location is an external hard drive and I copy the contents of this drive to another one, can I just plug in the other one and still have the edits I made using the previous hard drive? 

Thanks,

Philip

[Sameer K]

Adobe Lightroom syncs your work to the cloud. When you change the drives, it will ask you to relocate local copies. You can try this by ensuring the external drives are the same. However, this is experimental & might have unexpected results. 

Thanks!
Sameer K

[JohanElzenga]

If you use Adobe Lightroom, not Adobe Lightroom Classic, then making a backup of your local copies is not really needed at all. Your originals are in the cloud, so if you lose the disk with the local copies, then Lightroom can simply download them again from the cloud.

[Philip273508637hrw]

The thing is I don't have enough cloud storage for all my photos and I can't afford to buy more. And I haven't switched to Classic because I don't want to risk losing all edits. But thanks for the reply.

Philip

[Timothy.Spear]

Something does not compute for me.

If you are using Lr cloud focused, the only images it is aware of are in the cloud. So all edits are stored in the cloud. For performance reasons, Lr does allow for an option to keep either smart previews (scalled down images) or the originals as a local copy on attached storage on the computer (either fixed or external storage).

If you have an image, which is NOT in the cloud, then Lr cannot edit the image. When you add an image, with the express purpose of editing it, Lr first loads the image into a local cache and immediately queues it for sending to the cloud. At which point it is now in the cloud, and a local copy does not matter anymore.

So, if you can explain your workflow, we might be able to assist. But based on what you have stated so far, something does not add up for me.

Tim

[JohanElzenga]

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@Philip273508637hrw wrote:

The thing is I don't have enough cloud storage for all my photos and I can't afford to buy more. And I haven't switched to Classic because I don't want to risk losing all edits. But thanks for the reply.

Philip

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Switching to Lightroom Classic does not make you lose your edits. It's dead easy to transfer your cloud photos to Lightroom Classic. All you need to do is enable sync in the Lightroom Classic catalog. Lightroom Classic will then download all the cloud images to your computer. In the Lightroom Classic preferences - Lightroom Sync you can specify the location for the images and if you want Lightroom Classic to generate a dated folder hierarchy. Download a trial version and try for yourself.