How backup photos stored in Lightroom CC cloud? ”Local copy” does not seem to be synced with cloud?!

[PurpleTreetop]

I am a new Lightroom CC (not classic) user, with more than 100 000+ photos and videos, about 1.2 TB of media files.

In addition to Lightroom CC's default Adobe cloud storage, I have selected the option in the Lightroom PC/Windows/desktop app that a copy of all photos should also be stored locally on my PC. This local copy is my backup, in case I would for example lose access to Adobes cloud.

Initially, this works well: when I import new photos into Lightroom CC, a copy is indeed stored locally. I have, however, noticed that any changes I make within Lightroom CC (such as editing a photo, or deleting a photo) are NOT reflected/synced to the local files on my PC. It seems as if the local copy of my library is a static one-off copy from the moment the photo was first imported into Lightroom CC?

Am I doing something wrong here? 

Is there maybe another way to have an automatic backup of the current content in Lightroom CC cloud?

[Jim Wilde · Accepted solution]

No, you're doing nothing wrong. The wording of that preference option is "Store a copy of all originals at the specified location", and as Lightroom is a non-destructive editor the originals always remain unchanged. Edits are stored as parameters in the catalog database and only applied to the previews that you view in the app, or to derivative files when you export....so the originals that are stored locally are just a copy of the same untouched originals in the cloud. That option really isn't provided for "backup" purposes (though many users use it as such), it's mainly there to facilitate offline working when away from a network connection, or for performance purposes if the local network connection is slow and unreliable.

The deletions will eventually sync....when you delete an image from the cloud it goes into the Deleted album (i.e. a trash can) where it will stay for up to 60 days to give you the chance to change your mind. Only when it's eventually removed from the Deleted album will the local copy also be deleted.

There's no way at all of having a local automatic back of your cloud account, we are dependant upon Adobe to take care of that.

You can manually make "backups" by exporting all images to a local disk as "Original" which includes "settings" as well (so a raw file would export with an adjacent XMP sidecar file, other file-types would have the edits stored in the XMP section of the file header).