LR3 cat size

[chris shain]

G'day,  frequent reader - infrequent poster !
for the sceptics like myself out there who have queried the oft given advice that one large master LR cat is the way to go........ with a recently purchased PB (i7 8gb ram)  I've been testing a large cat (240,000 pics +) and it works a treat. I've not reached processor pain threshold yet, however I would be curious if anyone has ?
best from AU
Chris

[johnbeardy]

May I say "told ya so!" ?

One issue with a big catalogue is backup size. Even assuming one's backup targets just the lrcat file, it's still a big amount of unchanged data to back up. INow theyt've done work on making big catalogues (even) more usable, I'm hoping that Adobe will allow an incremental backup - effectively all the session's transactions - and rollback procedures. You get these with proper databases.

John

[rogerhoward]

I bzip2 my Lightroom catalogs as part of my backup pre-processing (the same pre-processing script also packages up a number of other databases and stages them for backup), which saves considerably on the backup size of the catalogs. Just FYI.

- Roger Howard

[johnbeardy]

Yes, I do the same, though manually. Even then, I quite often hear people using xmp sidecars for backup to the cloud, when an incremental backup would be as quick to upload and include all the metadata (inc flags, stacks, VCs, collections, history etc).

John

[zoliky]

I bzip2 my Lightroom catalogs as part of my backup pre-processing (the same pre-processing script also packages up a number of other databases and stages them for backup), which saves considerably on the backup size of the catalogs. Just FYI.

How did you compress your catalog? Is there a specific script or plugin for that?
I'm using lightroom 3 on Mac OS X.
Thank you!

Zoltan

[johnbeardy]

Just right click and choose compress.

John

[zoliky]

Thank you! I was interested in bzip2 compression, not "ZIP".

[Chris Bishop]

off topic, but related to backups. I've just spent several nights trawling my Ghost mirrors for the presets I'd collected and created. Mainly printing. They are not backed up routinely, and I missed them off my back up routine. Stupidly(!) I thought they were in the lrcat. file. A back up is only as good as its restore function. check it.
Chris Bishop

[BobSmith]

I think they can be put in the lrcat file.  It's a preference setting.  However know that you really need to set that before using a cagtalog a great deal.  One you switch to storing presets in the catalog then all the ones stored outside of the catalog are inaccessable... at least that was my experience when I messed with this some time ago.

Bob Smith