Lightroom Backups can waste a lot of you hard drive space

[steve of stonehenge]

I spent some time today moving some photos to a backup hard drive.  Then I was trying determine why my MacBook Pro (500GB storage) had so much space devote to pictures.  I went through each folder in the Pictures directory and found 50 GB of memory in the Lightroom folder.  Upon further inspection, I saw that each backup over the last three years was still there.  THAT IS NOT NECESSARY.  So I deleted (moved to the trash can) all the Lightroom Backups except the most recent one.  Then I emptied the trash can.  Each photo I store is over 30 MB.  That can really add up.  I certainly need to do a better job of deleting old photos and duplicates.   And really watch the panorama shots. I had one that was over 500 MB!  And of course video can really use up a lot of memory in a hurry.  The Adobe website has more info on backups.

[simonedf]

I store Lightroom backups on a 2TB external drive :-)

[janelux]

I delete my backups once a month.  Don't need the old ones and you're exactly right......they take up too much space!!!

 

Wish there was a way to do it automatically.  Think I'll post that as a hint on the Lightroom forum.

[Guest all8]

Umm, backing up to the same drive and/or computer which the originals are on ... is not really much of a backup.

 

You should backup to an external disk, or a different computer, or both. In my setup, Mac based, I use Time Machine for continual backups, and the make occasional backups to external disks (notice the plural). I also delete the "crud" pretty quickly because, as you have pointed out, these photos take up a lot of space ... especially the panoramas!

[Mr_A7s]

I have 1TB SSD on my PC as in process folder. I use two 5TB external HDs as backup. I keep one of external HD at home and the 2nd one at in law house(backup monthly).

 

Once I'm done editing my photos from my PC, I export the keepers to my external HDs in both JPEG and RAW.

[steve of stonehenge]

Just to set the record straight, I was only referring to the CATALOGUE backup.  Every time you do anything to a photo in LR, the program records the change in the Catalogue.  It never modifies the original photo whether JPG or some RAW format (ARW, DNG, TIFF etc).  I do hard drive backups every week or so and even make DVD backups of all DNG negatives once a year.  I also move all DNG negatives to a portable 2TB external drive.  This is probably a little excessive, but I have had at least one backup drive die without warning.