Now, as I explained in an earlier catalog video Lightroom backs up your catalog file once a week. And that's a good thing, because catalog files can become corrupted. So let me just show you where that leaves if I go into my finder or Windows Explorer, and go to my pictures folder and my Lightroom folder, and here's my Lightroom catalog file, my tiny little Lightroom catalog file that manages all my images. And here's the backups folder. So Lightroom automatically backs up into this folder once a week. And if your catalog becomes corrupted, then you can just go back to your previous backup and pick up where you left off.

Now it's unlikely that will happen. It's a wallet, I guess it could happen. I've never had a catalog corrupt on me, but I always do my backups because if I ever did, then I'll be able to go straight back to it. Now the catalog file is very small. It's only 158 megabytes, this particular catalog. Obviously that depends on the number of photos in your catalog.

But as they get larger and larger, you know the catalog fall reminds about 1% of the overall data because images are huge, catalogs are tiny, because catalogs are all just text or code. Now Lightroom also generates this preview data file. And that's a little bit bigger, but nowhere near as big as the negatives. That's like two and a half gig for this particular one. Now, the preview data is probably the least important file because in all reality, if that was to get deleted or misplaced, or whatever, Lightroom could just rebuild it. As long as they had the catalog file and the negatives Lightroom would just rebuild the previews, no problem.

So the catalog file is very important. But the negatives the negatives are obviously the most important thing of all. So here are my travel photos, Bali, Cambodia, so forth. Now this is a huge folder of images, isn't it? 57 gigabytes, 57 and a half gigabytes. So remember, the catalog file is tiny.

Here it you know, not even 200 megabytes, the travel photos, 57 gigabytes. So it's critical that these Travel photos be backed up, they need to be backed up on at least two separate hard drives at least two separate hard drives. I'm a firm believer that one backup is not enough. Because if that one backup files now you've got no backup. So if your primary source then files everything's lost, so you really must have two backups at all time of your images. So that's three copies in total, you've got your primary copy, plus two external backups.

And if one of those drives were to fail, you'd want to replace it very quickly before the next one did. So I don't mean to sound too hysterical, but I think it makes pretty good sense to ensure you've got at least two backups. So if one fails, you can replace it very quickly without fear of you know, everything else going pear shaped, so backup, and that's not unique to Lightroom that no matter what program you're using, all your data needs to be backed up. Now, the catalog file also needs to be backed up and not just here on your local computer that ideally needs to be backed up on your external drive as well with your photos. So all your data needs to be backed up because the catalog file is quite small. It can be backed up any number of places on a little you know, USB drive or in the in a cloud in the cloud, or there's any number of places you can backup, the catalog and the preview data because they're relatively small, but your negatives a huge negatives a huge so this, this requires a bit of file management.

This requires a bit of thought and a bit of file management. That's why with my logic catalogs, I have everything in folders by year, and then events so I can always check that my, my backups are up to date. I actually use the Drobo system which I've talked about before, and the Drobo system is a system with multiple hard drives within it. So I've got five separate hard drives in there that store all my negatives, and any two of those hard drives can file and it's still covered because the data distributes everything across the multiple drives. So this, this is something they used to call the raid system and Drobo sort of came up with a slightly easier to manage system where that they called Beyond raid. And it basically takes multiple hard drives, copies your data across all these hard drives.

And then if any one of them can die, any two of them can die and nothing gets lost and you just replace those drives. So that's the Drobo something you might like to look into. So let's just run a checklist on my backups. Firstly, and foremostly are my precious negatives backed up on at least two separate drives at least two separate drives that is critical, because that's the precious irreplaceable data. All the rest is replaceable, all the rest is just work that I guess you could do again if it was lost, but you must have your photos backed up on at least two separate drives. Then your catalog is your catalog file also backed up on two separate drives ideally.

So with the negatives, you'd have a copy of your catalog and Then finally, the the local backups that Lightroom runs automatically for you. Now I, I run a system on the apple operating system called time machine. So it's pretty good any Mac users probably wear a time machine and Time Machine backs up my entire computer every hour, every hour, it runs through backs up everything. So that gets my catalog file that gets my preview data that gets everything but the negatives, all my negatives. Remember, my negatives are not local on the computer. I'm in this example here.

My 57 gigabytes of negatives are local, but this is just a small catalog. This is a smoke catalog with any 1700 images that I created just for training purposes just for these videos and just for my classes. My real catalog, you will remember is enormous. And if I click here and show you my real catalog if I go other catalogs and travel, you'll see in here is my real travel catalog, and it's a little bit it's 1.1 point one gigabytes. So the The catalog is is 1.1 gigabytes, the preview data, the preview data is 34 gigabytes. So that's pretty big.

That's a lot of preview data that's 65,000 images that I remember. And I've also got some smart preview data, you might remember that's only 3.4 gigabytes. Because that's not smart preview data of 65,000 images, it's only have about 13,000, my one star or more. So that smart preview data is pretty efficient. And then I've got my regular backups as well, which I've just recently cleaned out. So I've only got the most recent backup there.

So that's my real travel catalog. There's the catalog, preview data and backups, no negatives. Remember the negatives are off on my Drobo. So I know it's a it can seem a little bit bewildering to be sort of confronted with all these backup concerns, my catalog, my preview data, my negatives, but you got to do it. You've simply got to do it these precious images that you've you know put so much effort into capturing and editing and all the rest of it, you need to back them up on multiple drives because hard drives can fail. So I hope that all makes sense with regards to backups.

I mean, it's probably this is probably not the most interesting of all the videos. There's not a lot of visual excitement going on talking about backups, but it's something that needs to be talked about backing up the catalog, backing up the negatives, that's what's critical to catalog backup local is to backup against corruption, but then an external backup as well to backup against Hard Drive File. Yeah, so I hope that all makes sense. But most importantly, your big heavy negatives need to be backed up on at least two separate drives. I think I've said that enough times now having at least two separate drives. And the moment one of those drives fails as it inevitably will, then you must replace it straightaway and copy from one to the other.