Today’s Question: My question is when I exit Lightroom and want to backup files where should I direct it to backup? I have an external hard drive and I back it up using GoodSync. I know my photos are on my external hard drive, but I am just wondering where to store my backup.
Tim’s Quick Answer: I recommend backing up your Lightroom catalog to an external hard drive. If you are using an external hard drive as the primary storage location for your photos, I recommend using a folder on that same drive as the location where your Lightroom catalog backups are stored.
More Detail: When it comes to making a backup of your Lightroom catalog, I feel it is important to ensure the backup is stored in a location that is different from the location where the source catalog is stored. After all, if you need to recover from a backup because the hard drive containing your Lightroom catalog failed, your only option will be to recover from a backup on a different storage device.
By default Lightroom will store the backup of your catalog in the same general location as the original catalog. I recommend changing that default location to a drive that is separate from the drive where your catalog is stored.
If you store your photos on an external hard drive, I think it makes perfect sense to backup your Lightroom catalog to a folder on the same external hard drive where you store your photos. This approach has the added advantage of ensuring that when you backup your photos you are also backing up your backup copies of the Lightroom catalog, providing additional redundancy.
Of course, if you store your Lightroom catalog on an external hard drive along with your photos, then I would recommend storing Lightroom’s backup of the catalog on a different hard drive, such as the internal hard drive on your computer. The key is to store backup copies separate from the source files being backed up.