Cloud back up of KR 2020 - I have thousands of images which I back up to an online back up service

[Grumpyjim]

Just updated to the new 'Cloudy" LR 2020. Think I will get to like it  BUT I already use an online back up service for ALL the data on my Mac - photos (of which I have thousands) etc. etc  and do not want/need to backup to the cloud plus I would neet to buy a lot more storeage solely for the photos. So will LR still write all the necessary info to the Catalogue etc etc pn my local disc and I will be 'safe' and can sleep easy????

[Grumpyjim]

OOOPS typo LR 2020

[john beardsworth · Accepted solution]

The Cloudy catalogue is in the cloud, as are your originals. The local catalogue and anything in local storage on your hard drive is just reading whatever is in the cloud and caching it locally until you are online again.

Adobe backup the cloud catalogue and originals, but this is entirely behind the scenes and out of your control. If you want a backup of your photos, you have to make this yourself, either before sending the files to Cloudy or by also using Classic Lightroom and letting it sync originals down from the cloud.

[JP Hess]

Lightroom cloudy is not intended to be simply a backup service. The whole philosophy is to have the images in the cloud and, if desired, to have a backup of those images on your hard drive. If that is NOT your intention, and you would prefer to have your catalog and your images on your hard drive and use a different cloud backup service, then perhaps Lightroom Classic might be more suitable for your purposes. Using Lightroom Classic, it is still possible to share collections of smart previews with the cloud version. These collections of smart previews have no impact on your allotment of cloud space from Adobe. So you can share as many collections as you choose.

[Grumpyjim]

Many thanks, I fully inderstand & agree with Adobe's move to a cloud based system as that is the future. I only have two gripes 1. It would cost me around £50 per month more for the extra 200Gb!, 2 No mention is made in any of the info I can find on LR Cloud that it is exclusively cloud based! So I will revert to LR CC having wasted about 7 days days setting up the Cloud system (made more difficult as I was moving to a new Mac + OS both of which were incompatable with the old (very) old Mac)

[john beardsworth]

From the home page: "Lightroom is the cloud-based service...."

It might not use the word "exclusively", but nowhere does it say it is anything else. You're not the first person to be misled though!

You can still use Cloudy and it's better than Classic Lightroom at syncing originals to the cloud, if that's what you want, but it has fewer and weaker features. It's rather like Lightroom Mobile but running on a Mac or PC, so it works OK on a laptop where you can access images synced from Classic Lightroom on your main computer.