Lightroom: Backing Up Your Catalog

I’ve always wished Lightroom would allow me to backup my catalog when I wanted. No, Lightroom does not allow me to backup my catalogs. Lightroom decides for me when to backup my catalogs. And I often disagree with Lightroom.

1. I want to backup my Lightroom catalogs when I’m finished with my session and I have done important changes such as importing photos, mass updates…
2. I want to backup my Lightroom catalogs before I do a mass update, a mass delete, a general update of keywords…
3. I want to backup whenever I want to backup, through the file menu.

Since you can’t, you have to influence Lightroom with:

Edit > Catalog Settings > General tab > Backup section and use the drop down arrow to the: Next time Lightroom starts only.

You close Lightroom and restart Lightroom. It will do the backup, you will need to go back to:

Edit > Catalog Settings > General tab > Backup section and use the drop down arrow to the: Once a week, upon starting Lightroom.

What a pain! It would be so much simpler to have a menu access to the catalog backups.