Today’s Question: I have Lightroom Classic catalog backups dating back to June of 2024. To free up room, can I delete the backups from 2024 and most of 2025? If yes, how many backups should be kept?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, older catalog backups for Lightroom Classic can be deleted. I generally recommend retaining recent backups, but only a handful of older backups, and deleting all backups older than about six months.
More Detail: The older a catalog backup is, the less valuable it tends to be. And the more catalog backups you have, the more likely you’ll be able to recover from a recent backup. It isn’t incredibly likely, for example, that if your catalog got corrupted the backups would also be corrupted going back multiple months.
I think it is fair to say that most photographers will only perform the work of deleting older catalog backups on a periodic basis, perhaps triggered by their hard drive starting to get full. So, for most of us this isn’t something you need to do on a particularly frequent basis.
The way I think about retaining catalog backups is that I would first delete any catalogs that are older than about six months. Among backups that date between about three and six months I would tend to retain only a few, perhaps one or two per month. For backups that are less than three months old, I would tend to keep all of them, but if you’re particularly low on storage space you could certainly modify this approach to just retain some of the backups that are relatively new. I generally prefer to retain all (or at least most) backups that are less than a month old.
This approach can also be modified based on how frequently you back up your catalog. For example, if you back up the catalog every day, personally I would tend to clear out those backups a bit more frequently.
Note, by the way, that it is now possible to delete catalog backups from the Backups tab of the Catalog Settings dialog. On the Backups list select the backups you want to discard and then click the Delete button at the bottom-right of the list.
