Today’s Question: I’ve discovered that Backblaze has not backed up my Lightroom Classic catalog files (.Ircat). I have this problem on several desktops running Windows 10/11 and have multiple Lightroom Classic catalogs on each that have not been backed up!
Tim’s Quick Answer: Backblaze will back up the Lightroom Classic catalog files by default. You just need to make sure you don’t have an exclusion or file size limit, and that you’ve allowed enough time for the backup.
More Detail: With the default settings, Backblaze will back up all your Lightroom Classic catalog files to their servers, providing an offsite backup of those files. However, there are some settings that can limit which files are being backed up.
Note, by the way, that some of the files associated with the Lightroom Classic catalog are “container” files and therefore will appear as a subfolder when browsing via Backblaze even though they appear as individual files on your computer.
The first thing to do is make sure that there isn’t a file size limit affecting the files you’re not finding in your backup. Bring up the Backblaze Preferences dialog by clicking on the icon for Backblaze and choosing “Backblaze Preferences” from the popup menu. Then click the Settings button and go to the Exclusions tab. At the bottom of the tab, make sure the “Do no backup files larger than” popup is set to “No Limit” (or an adequately high limit for your needs if you do want to exclude very large files).
The other thing to confirm is that the file type exclusion list doesn’t include file types you want to back up. In this case, for example, you would want to be sure that “lrcat” is not listed in the text box associated with the “The following file types will not be backed up” label.
In this case you are obviously backing up at least some of the files in the folder containing your catalogs, so obviously there is not a folder exclusion. But it is worth noting that you can also exclude specific folders on the Exclusions tab as well.
Assuming everything is configured so that the catalog files will be backed up, it is just a matter of allowing enough time for the backup to complete. Files are processed from smallest to largest, and so your largest files won’t be backed up until all smaller files have been backed up successfully. It can take considerable time to complete the initial backup, so if that has not completed yet it may simply be a matter of more time being required for the backup to complete.
