If you're like me and backup your LR catalog regularly, you may have noticed that the Lightroom Backups folder can get quite large. The way mine was going that folder would soon be larger than all my photo files
So I did some poking around and was wondering if LR did either a full backup of the catalog every time it did one, or did an incremental, so I tried a few things. Searching in the LR help files didn't find anything. There was only one reference to increment, and none to incremental, so that was no help. I started looking in the folders themselves and found that each backup was progressively larger than the one before, so it seemed that LR was performing a full backup each time. So I renamed the Lightroom Backups folder to something else and created a new backup folder and reran the backup. The new backup file matched the size of the one that had been taken just a few minutes before, suggesting it did a full backup each time since the earlier ones were missing. I now felt it safe to get rid of all the previous backups that were in there since I first started using LR (about 18 gigs worth!). And then I did a backup of the backup.......
Just a tip to help save you some HD space!
Now.....does anyone know of a way to make the database files a bit smaller, other than getting rid of files? I already did a catalog optimization, and that didn't seem to do anything. I also got rid of the 1:1 image previews and set LR to generate one each time I looked at the pictures and to get rid of them after one day to try and save some space. LR will regenerate those each time you go into a folder in the Library.
To optimize your catalog in LR go to File -> Catalog Settings and on the General tab there is a button to "Relaunch and Optimize". This will also help speed up LR if your catalog is large and you add and delete a lot of pictures.
HTH!
So I did some poking around and was wondering if LR did either a full backup of the catalog every time it did one, or did an incremental, so I tried a few things. Searching in the LR help files didn't find anything. There was only one reference to increment, and none to incremental, so that was no help. I started looking in the folders themselves and found that each backup was progressively larger than the one before, so it seemed that LR was performing a full backup each time. So I renamed the Lightroom Backups folder to something else and created a new backup folder and reran the backup. The new backup file matched the size of the one that had been taken just a few minutes before, suggesting it did a full backup each time since the earlier ones were missing. I now felt it safe to get rid of all the previous backups that were in there since I first started using LR (about 18 gigs worth!). And then I did a backup of the backup.......
Just a tip to help save you some HD space!
Now.....does anyone know of a way to make the database files a bit smaller, other than getting rid of files? I already did a catalog optimization, and that didn't seem to do anything. I also got rid of the 1:1 image previews and set LR to generate one each time I looked at the pictures and to get rid of them after one day to try and save some space. LR will regenerate those each time you go into a folder in the Library.
To optimize your catalog in LR go to File -> Catalog Settings and on the General tab there is a button to "Relaunch and Optimize". This will also help speed up LR if your catalog is large and you add and delete a lot of pictures.
HTH!