Lightroom Backups

[Mike Farley]

My computer has started to become unstable recently and is not always coming out properly from sleep mode. It's something I am discussing with tech support, which in this instance is a totally silent non verbal and unwritten conversation. The techie advised reloading the graphics driver, which seemed to be successful for a while until today when the problem returned.

Earlier on, for the first time ever, my Lightroom catalog became corrupted following a system freeze and I had to reinstate it from a backup. In effect, my PC has two disk drives, a SSD from which I boot and run applications, and a hard disk where I keep all my data including my Lightroom catalog. It was straightforward enough to reinstate the catalog with a copy and paste, and I have taken the opportunity to transfer it to the SSD, which has helped to improve performance. My copy of Lightroom is configured to create a backup to the data disk each time it exits, so that I have an up to date copy on both disks. As a belt and braces measure, the data disk is also copied regularly to an external drive.

SSDs are relatively inexpensive nowadays and becoming more commonplace in PC builds, so if the option exists and the SSD is large enough, others might want to think about doing something similar. I also use my SSD as my Photoshop scratch disk, again to enhance performance. The minimum size for a SSD which I would recommend to allow such a setup to be achieved comfortably is 256 GB.