Lightroom 6 Catalog Previews Question

I know Lightroom creates previews and keeps them in a folder \Pictures\Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata (at least in the Windows version of Lightroom).

 

At present my "Previews" folder is over 1.6 GB in size. These are "Medium" quality previews; the 1:1 previews are kept for 1 week only.

 

From what I have read, Lightroom will recreate this folder if it is missing. Is this true? If so, I will discontinue backing up the LIghtroom Catalog Previews.lrdata directory.

 

Of course I always back up the catalog itself (Pictures\Lightroom Catalog.lrcat ).

You can delete the Previews folder, but 1.6 GB isn't that much. I'm not aware that LR backs up the Previews folder or are you doing that manually? LR backs up the Catalog as often as you have set it to do so in the Catalog Preferences. Besides backing up the Catalog, backing up the images themselves is extremely important. Are you doing so?

Hi Alan,

 

Thank you for the reply.

 

I do back up the images - daily, weekly, and monthly. And with the images back up the previews are also backed up. If the previews would be re-built in case of a disk failure or disaster, I would prefer not to spend the time backing them up.

 

You are correct; LR does not back up images or the previews. I use SyncToy to make my daily backups to an external hard drive on my desk, Windows 7 Backup to back up to an internal drive weekly, and a script I wrote uses Robocopy to copy the data to external SSD monthly for off site storage in my safe deposit box. If I do not have to copy the previews, which will continue to grow in size, I will save both time and back up space.