How to Back Up Lightroom Catalog? Is External Drive Fine?

Backing up your Lightroom catalog is essential to protect your edits, presets, and photo organization. But what’s the best way to do it? In this video, we’ll walk you through the step-by-step process of backing up your Lightroom catalog, explain why it’s crucial, and explore whether an external drive is a good option for storing your backups. Stay tuned to keep your Lightroom workflow safe and secure from unexpected data loss!

This video is from our Lightroom Workflow and Organization Course.

Video Summary

In this lesson, you will learn how and why to back up your Lightroom Classic Catalog. While a catalog doesn’t store your actual photos, it holds all your edits, keywords, and metadata. The instructor explains how to set the frequency of these backups and provides critical advice on choosing a backup location to ensure your data survives hardware failure.

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Time Stamps

• 0:13 – Why Back Up? Explaining that losing a catalog means losing all your hours of editing and metadata, even if your photos are safe.
• 1:28 – Accessing Settings: Navigating to Edit > Catalog Settings to find backup options.
• 1:43 – Backup Frequency: Choosing between “Every time Lightroom exits,” “Once a day,” or “Once a week.”
• 3:07 – The Backup Window: What you see when you exit Lightroom and why the default location is a risk.
• 3:43 – The Hardware Rule: Why you should never back up your catalog to the same drive where the original catalog lives (e.g., C: Drive).
• 4:27 – External Drive Strategy: Recommending an external drive for catalog backups to protect against computer failure.
• 4:54 – Integrity & Optimization: Why you should keep the “Test Integrity” and “Optimize” checkboxes checked.
• 5:19 – Performance Tip: Advice to keep your original catalog on your internal SSD/computer for speed, but the backup on an external drive.