Backing up PSE Catalog

[elisabeth999]

I have read many of the threads relating to back-ups and remain confused regarding an important point.

Is there any value in using the File / Backup Catalog command in PSE 5?

Like many of the forum contributors, I take the following steps wrt back-ups:
- After downloading pictures from my camera, I make an immediate DVD copy. On after checking that DVD copy do I delete images from my camera's memory card.
- I have an EHD (Maxtor) which runs a back-up of all of our picture, media and document folders every evening at 11:00 pm. Included in this daily back-up is the PSE 5 Catalog file. (I have it stored on a Public drive to allow sharing by more than one member of our family.)

So, here's my question: If I am backing up the "Catalog" file every evening at 11:00pm, all of my hard work in tagging my images, sorting them in Collections, etc. is being captured, right? The "Catalog" file is the file that captures all of the PSE Organizer tagging information, right?

If this is true, what is the value of performing the File / Back-up command from within PSE 5?

The reason that I ask is that I find that the File / Back-up takes forever: up to one hour. I have 26000+ images in my Catalog and I do the File/Back-up command also to the EHD.

I have PSE 5 running on Vista.

Thanks for your input.

[johnrellis]

Elisabeth,

If you’re confident that your Maxtor backup is backing up the catalog file and all your photos, then there isn’t a strong reason to use the PSE Backup command.

The PSE Backup does have some advantages: It lets you easily restore your photos to a different location. This is most useful when moving to a new account or new computer, which could set up different actual folder paths for My Pictures (XP) or Pictures (Vista). With your Maxtor backups, if you have to restore your photo folders to a different location, you could end up needing to do File > Reconnect to tell the catalog, and Reconnect can be fussy (though it does work).

However, Backup does have general disadvantages: In PSE 6/7, it has a number of bugs (which usually can be worked around), and there have been lots of reports of it not working properly when you move from an old version of PSE to a newer one at the same time you’re moving to a new computer and version of Windows. (For example, suppose your computer fails completely next year and you buy a new one with Windows 7 and you find out that (say) PSE 5 doesn’t run on Windows 7 -- this has happened with earlier versions of PSE.)

Combing this with the fact that Adobe has stopped fixing most file-management bugs in the PSE 6/7 Organizer, I lean in favor of using a reliable third-party backup, such as that bundled with Maxtor.

Note that Adobe markets PSE 7’s ability to sync with Photoshop.com as “backup”. While it does provide limited backup of your photos, it has a number of severe limitations: It doesn’t backup stacks, version sets, or projects, it gets the order within albums wrong, and it can lose dates/times of photos.

[Juergen D]

You are quite right. You really do not need the PSE-internal back-up if you have copies of both the images and the catalog file(s). If you ever have to use this backup then you will have to restore all files and folders in their original structure and hierarchy. It has been done and it works.

It is helpful if you have written the tag and properties info to the image files. Also, keeping a copy of the thumbnail cache file would eliminate the need to recreate them after a restore.

This covers a normal restore after some crash or hard drive misfunction. If you want to transfer your catalog and pictures to a different computer or to an upgraded version of PSE, you will have to take some additional steps. If you were to restore from XP to Vista, you may want to reconsider the PSE backup routine for that procedure.

Juergen

[dj_paige]

File->Backup Catalog forces you to recover/repair your catalog, and reconnect files, each time you make a backup. If you are doing this regularly anyway, and you can move everything (photos and catalog) back to their original locations, then using non-PSE backup tools is fine.

I would add that using PSE Backup tools is what I still recommend for beginners. If you are comfortable with making your own backups, then PSE Backups aren't necessary.