Hello everyone. Today a Backup topic inside Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

As you know, backup is a very important (crucial) part of your workflow as a photographer (even if you are just an amateur photographer you don’t want to loose all your images). Fortunately, Lightroom can backup your Catalog anytime you want, depending on the settings you use in your Preferences.

To setup Backup, you need to go to your Catalog Settings (Edit->Catalog Settings or Ctrl-Alt-, (Win) / Command-Option-, (Mac):

In the Backup Section, in the General tab you can set how often do you want Lightroom to backup your Catalog and when you want Lightroom to do it:

• Never
• Once a month
• Once a week
• Once a day
• Every time Lightroom Exits
• When Lightroom next exits

I use Once a week as I don’t work in Lightroom every single day. Your choice will depend on how often you use Lightroom and how paranoid you are about your work 😉

Next time your Backup is due, you will see this dialog box:

Make sure that box checkboxes are checked, this will make sure that your Catalog is optimized and the integrity of the Catalog is tested.

Test Integrity checkbox will check for catalog corruption.

Here’s some important information  straight from Adobe regarding Backups:

Backups executed from Lightroom include only the catalog file. You must manually back up your edited photos, previews, sidecar files, slide shows, web galleries, and exported photos outside Lightroom.

Important: (Mac OS) If you use Time Machine™ while Lightroom 3 is open, Lightroom marks the catalog as excluded from the backup. When Lightroom quits, it removes the catalog from the exclusion list and Time Machine can back it up.

source: Adobe Community Help