Backing up a catalog to multiple drives
I want to back up my catalog to my C drive and also keep a safety copy on an external drive. What are best practices? Can I safely alternate which destination I choose each time I exit or do I risk anything this way? Maybe my question really is: is a backup self contained or does it rely in part on previous backup files?
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Check out the official knowledge base: https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&type=knowledge_base&query=backup
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The backup is self-contained in that it is not incremental and does not depend on previous backups. But remember that the backup only backs up the catalog database, with its information on edits, etc. It does NOT back up the actual image files.
So... presumably you have a system backup strategy in place anyway to back up the image files (and other valuable content on your computer)? If so, that can include backing up the Capture One backups from the C drive.
Ian
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Thanks for responding. Why does Capture One recommend keeping more than one chronological backup. Do they sometimes not work so you have to use an older one?
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I suppose that it's a matter of being suitable cautious. If you had a problem with your catalog in some way, you might want to have more than one backup in case the most recent one had backed up the catalog with its problem. But there is no point keeping very old ones because they won't have backups of recent work. I go through mine from time to time and delete older ones, just keeping the last few. (Your question has prompted me to do it again, and from all that are there waiting to be deleted I see that I have left it rather a long time to do some tidying up!)
Ian
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Thanks Ian!
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Regards
Per
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Thanks for responding. Why does Capture One recommend keeping more than one chronological backup. Do they sometimes not work so you have to use an older one?
The reason for this is if your catalog gets corrupted in a way that is not immediately noticeable, then you may create multiple backups before you notice the problem. If you only have the latest backup, that too will be corrupted. So, it can be useful to go back more than one backup until you find one that does not contain the corruption. I keep at least the last 10 backups myself. Compared to the space my RAW images takes, the catalog itself is pretty small so keeping multiple backups is no big deal to me.
What I find odd is that neither LR or C1 will let you set how many backups to keep and automatically remove the really old ones. I wrote my own script that runs each night does that for me so I don't have to every manually clean up backups.
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