LR4 backups and Catalog

My system has about 22 backups of my LR spanning from 01-12 to 07-12. I really haven't made that many changes to my images in that time span.

Can I delete about half of those backups and not any problems.

Also, I have a LR3 catalog taking up space on my drive, can that be deleted of do I need it?

The reason for this is I'm running low on drive space on my laptop so I'm trying to get rid of duplicate files. I'll still save a copy to my backup, I just want it off my laptop HD if possible without causing problems.

I know HD space is cheap now and I do backup ALL my stuff to external drives but I still like having things organized and I like to minimize duplicate stuff when possible.

Thanks

Yes and yes.

Because I back up my computers to external hard drives on a nightly basis, I don't have LR do any backups of its catalogues at all. What's the point?

I periodically delete all but the last three.

The LR backups can be nice for quick access but definitely delete the older ones! You can use your system browser to do this (LR doesn't keep a "list"). You won't need them in your back-up drives either.

thanks guys.

I'm a bit puzzled. When I do a catalog backup ( have LR set to ask each time I close the program), LR just overwrites the previous backup file. When I look in my backup folder there is just one file.

I also back up the images, including the LR Catalog backup folder, to a 2tb external HDD, and I alternate between 2 folders on that so that I always have the 2 most recent backups.

Preeb wrote in post #14774824
I'm a bit puzzled. When I do a catalog backup ( have LR set to ask each time I close the program), LR just overwrites the previous backup file. When I look in my backup folder there is just one file.

I also back up the images, including the LR Catalog backup folder, to a 2tb external HDD, and I alternate between 2 folders on that so that I always have the 2 most recent backups.

Not by me. I backup to an external -backing up to the internal where the master catalog is makes no sense to me - and LR creates a dated folder into which it puts the .lrcat file. Since the folder name is that day's date each one is unique and they don't overwrite.

Preeb wrote in post #14774824
I'm a bit puzzled. When I do a catalog backup ( have LR set to ask each time I close the program), LR just overwrites the previous backup file. When I look in my backup folder there is just one file.

I also back up the images, including the LR Catalog backup folder, to a 2tb external HDD, and I alternate between 2 folders on that so that I always have the 2 most recent backups.

tzalman wrote in post #14776437
Not by me. I backup to an external -backing up to the internal where the master catalog is makes no sense to me - and LR creates a dated folder into which it puts the .lrcat file. Since the folder name is that day's date each one is unique and they don't overwrite.

That is odd behavior, I agree. My backup folder is "set" to an external drive folder, and then when the backup happens LR does as Eli describes, it creates a date-specific folder that contains the catalog .lrcat file.

Interestingly, I had thought that the backup folder also contained Previews, but I guess not!