Lately, I’ve been noticing a baffling problem. The space on my system hard drive keeps getting filled up. I wasn’t sure how this was happening since I keep my operating system and program files on this system hard drive but I keep all my photo files and other data on a different hard drive. Why was the system drive filling up? Today I finally took some time to really investigate and found the culprit. Lightroom 2 backup files. I usually back up my lightroom catalog about once a week. After a little google research, I learned that lightroom creates a complete copy of the catalog every time you do a backup. And more importantly, it does not remove prior backups. It turns out my system hard drive was full of weekly backups for the past year! No wonder the drive was running out of space.
I decided to google again just to be sure that it was safe to delete those old lightroom backup files. According to the Adobe.com website Lightroom 2 help pages, “Lightroom writes a new catalog every time it creates a backup. To save space on your hard disk, you may want to delete or compress old backup files.” I did just that and recovered nearly 10gb of hard drive space. Because I’m slightly paranoid, I did leave the last 4 backups in case one (or a few, I know its illogical) of the backups got corrupted.