I suspect that Backup is not the same as Export catalog. The reason is that if you have a slightly corrupted catalog, doing a backup and opening the back up does not resolve the corruption. However, exporting the enitre catalog as a new catalog does (sometimes) fix the corruption. I know that the "backup" is an OS level system operation that basically zips the contents of two files. But, the Export as catalog walks the catalog following links from file to file and builds the new catalog piece by piece. Of course that does not preclude them packaging a series of steps under one button. For example, the Open Other Catalog or Open Recent allows you to point to another catalog and it will ask if you want the current one backed up first. If you say yes it closes the current catalog, backs it up, then opens the one you pointed to. This would do what you want (although it may take just as long as manually closing LrC and then re-opening it) if they allowed you to point to the current catalog as the new one to open. Howeve if you do that, it just leaves you where you are. But, I'm not seeing this idea as having much wide spread benefit. First of all, catalog changes are saved to the database pretty much in real time so it is somewhat rare for a system crash to damage anything (it used to, but not so much in later releases). Secondly, the workaround of spending the minute to close and reopen the catalog is not really that terrible a burden for those who want the security of "saving your work" to another drive. I'd much rather the engineers at Adobe be told to spend there time on much more important things like synchronizing keywords between LR and LrC, among others.
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