Easily backup your Lightroom 4 catalog on demand
Lightroom’s catalog backup feature provides a vital service, helping protect its users from loosing work due to accidents or system issues rendering their precious catalog unusable. It’s simple and convenient to use and requires no additional software to work.
Still some users choose to go to the effort of rolling their own Lightroom catalog backup solution instead. Why? There are many potential reasons but two that stood out for me were the amount of disk space the uncompressed backups consumed, and the awkward steps required to trigger a backup outside of your regular schedule.
My TPG LR Backup plugin was created to help resolve these backup limitations. It reduces the disk space consumed by Lightroom’s catalog backups. And now it can also help trigger those catalog backups whenever Lightroom 4 users need them!
With the introduction of Lightroom 4 my plugin can now schedule a catalog backup at the next shutdown, regardless of your regular backup schedule. In fact you don’t even need a backup schedule to use this new feature. Once the TPG LR Backup plugin is installed you simply open up the File –> Plug-in Extras menu and select the new Offer to Backup Catalog at Next Shutdown menu item. Once you OK the resultant dialog Lightroom will now show you the standard catalog backup dialog when you next exit Lightroom. Simple!
Currently the only other ways I know of to backup a Lightroom catalog on demand are to:
- temporarily change Lightroom’s catalog backup schedule to “Every time”, and then reset it to the normal schedule after you next restart Lightroom
- set Lightroom’s catalog backup schedule to “Every day” or “Every time” and cancel the backup dialog when you don’t need to run a backup
- copy the catalog file to a new location while Lightroom isn’t running
I know which approach I’d rather use to keep my Lightroom catalog safe!
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In: Howto, Software · Tagged with: backup, configuration, lightroom, plugin, workflow
Does your plugin get rid of the backup dialog box? I wish it would just run instead of nagging me!!!!
@Greg, No, it doesn’t get rid of the backup dialog box. The database used by LR can’t be backed up while LR is running so I rely upon the inbuilt catalog backup feature to ensure the backup is only made when it is safe to do so. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have a quiet/automatic mode.
At least the new menu item will help those who schedule backups daily just so they can OK the backup when they really need it. They can reduce the backup schedule frequency so they won’t see the dialog so often.
Hi Matt,
Lately I’ve not been able to get TPG LR backup to work. It will zip the Configuration files, but not the Catalog backup files. Most of the catalog backups are in the 5 GB range (most recent lrcat file is 5.49 GB). I use an iMac, OS X version 10.6.8.
Here is the error report.
“Zip log opened Mon Oct 15 16:47:45 2012
command line arguments:
-9oTmr -lf /var/folders/do/doa3gwBpHxmybR2EI6079E+++TI/-Tmp-/TPG-LR-Backup_zip.log “/Users/philipmcalary/Documents/TPG Lightroom Backups/Catalogue Backups/Phils Lightroom 4 Catalog-2012-10-11 2106.zip” “./2012-10-11 2106″
zip warning: Found UnZip version 5.52
zip warning: Need UnZip 6.00 or later to test this Zip64 archive
zip error: Zip file invalid, could not spawn unzip, or wrong unzip (/Users/philipmcalary/Documents/TPG Lightroom Backups/Catalogue Backups/Phils Lightroom 4 Catalog-2012-10-11 2106.zip)
2012-10-15 17:31:58 -0400, TRACE Catalog backup failed for: Phils Lightroom 4 Catalog-2012-10-11 2106.zip, with status: Error: Backup file was invalid or corrupted when verified (return = 2048).
Most frequently occurs when creating large backups (> 1.5 Gb) that reach system or filesystem limits.
Please consider verifying that the backup’s source area doesn’t contain unexpected large files.
2012-10-15 18:38:56 -0400, TRACE Compressed 0 catalog backup(s) and failed to compress 3 catalog backup(s)”
Hope you can help solve this problem, Many Thanks, Phil McAlary
A quick update. The version of TPG-LR-Backup I published last night now includes its own version of zip and unzip on Mac. This should fix the issues people such as Phil reported regarding large catalog backup support.
I just bought this and I can’t get it to work… In the progress box it says it starts to backup but then the progress menu disappears and I don’t have any backups in the folder specified. Here’s my config http://s10.postimg.org/e48gq4jft/Screen_Shot_2013_09_20_at_7_53_46_PM.png
@Amanda, Sorry, the Mac build of v1.14 has an issue. Your config is unlikely to be the issue. I’m working on a fix right now and hope to have v1.15 out in the next 24 hours.
v1.15 was just released. It should resolve the issues reported by @Amanda.