# Secure backup for Lightroom CC?



## JonathanS

How do I create a secure  extra back-up of all my 37,000 photos now migrated to the Lightroom Cloud?
Adobe do not guarantee all my photos are preserved for ever.
Is there a way of sending all my pictures from LR CC to Dropbox or even an external hard drive?
many thanks


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## Johan Elzenga

Lightroom CC has a preference option to store a copy of the images locally. You can set the location, so you can choose an external drive or your Dropbox folder.


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## Conrad Chavez

Another option is to use the free Adobe Lightroom Downloader app. It will download "all your Lightroom photos and videos from the cloud as original files and writes them into a date-based folder hierarchy at the hard-drive location that you specify," according to the linked Adobe page.


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## clee01l

One thing that is not being taken into account is version control. Let's say that you have an image in the cloud and want a copy locally.   Later you decide to delete the image from the cloud.  Once it is gone from the cloud it's gone.  No undo. So you sign on to one of the options suggested..   How do you manage to permanently delete an image once it is stored locally or in DropBox?     I think with the Lightroom Store Images locally,  LR will do the housekeeping on the web and the local disk.   But once it is gone for the local disk there is no recovery if that "delete" was an "Oops".   
A dedicated backup solution wo;; let you go back in time and recover images from before when they were deleted locally. TimeMachine is an excellent choice for MacOS.  There are others as well and many have the capability to run in a Windows environment if that is your preferred OS.


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## MarcRJacobs

The local copy seems to only be the original, not the edited, final version. To get that you need to export as jpg


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## Victoria Bampton

MarcRJacobs said:


> The local copy seems to only be the original, not the edited, final version. To get that you need to export as jpg


That is correct, yes.


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## sylvie27

When you use Adobe Downloader to download all pictures you have on Lightroom Cloud, what information will be included?
I assume capture dates? What about keywords? They won't be organized into collections, right?


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## johnbeardy

There is no user-controlled backup for Cloudy Lightroom.

The Downloader is not a backup utility - it's a lifeboat, designed to let you escape from Cloudy Lightroom. It is almost totally undocumented by Adobe and just dumps all your stuff back on dry land, leaving files in dated folders with xmp files. 
If you store all images locally, these are just a cache - delete the file in Cloudy and your local copy will also go.


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## sylvie27

I need  a lifeboat. 
I've been in the process of gathering pictures from all different places. Some of them scanned and organized them in Lightroom Cloud. 
Somehow, inadvertently, I must have changed the capture dates of all 7,000+ photos last week and I have no backup.
I'm trying to fix the dates now, but looking into  working with a different system.
Having the backup organized by date would be a start. 
Next, I need to figure out how I can have them organized in folders and albums (or collections) which would sync across my devices.
I'm considering working with Lightroom classic and sync them with Lightroom Cloud.


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## Linwood Ferguson

sylvie27 said:


> I'm considering working with Lightroom classic and sync them with Lightroom Cloud.


One reason I continue to use only Classic is it allows me to be completely in control of my originals, back them up properly, integrity check them, etc. 

I honestly believe Adobe should do more to reassure the paranoid among us (you know who you are!) that their cloud copy is secure -- not from theft or such, but from user error, bit rot, malicious hacking, mistakes that Adobe might make themselves, natural disaster of their datacenter (ok, I think it's actually Amazon's), etc.   Maybe they are doing an amazingly thorough job, but silence leads some to assume the best, and some the worst (the scary ones frankly are those of you who have not even considered it!). 

So I use classic and if I want them on the web I use Smugmug.   And my masters stay on my desktop, with three local backups and one cloud backup, that is versioned, checksummed, and done with two separate backup programs.


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## sylvie27

Smugmug may have features that Lightroom Cloud doesn't have. 
I'm not a commercial photographer. 
So, if I choose Lightroom Classic because I want the back ups that Cloud doesn't have, wouldn't it be possible to also store my originals in the Lightroom Cloud? After all, I would have 1T available...


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## Linwood Ferguson

sylvie27 said:


> Smugmug may have features that Lightroom Cloud doesn't have.
> I'm not a commercial photographer.
> So, if I choose Lightroom Classic because I want the back ups that Cloud doesn't have, wouldn't it be possible to also store my originals in the Lightroom Cloud? After all, I would have 1T available...



So... Smugmug and LR Cloud are quite different, though both at some level allow you to display content to others.  LR cloud is (in my mind) more about distributed editing.   SM is about sharing content. 

Hopefully someone else will confirm this answer, but my loose understanding is that the problem is that files ingested into LR CLassic only send smart previews to the cloud, not the originals.  So you could do that and continue editing the smart previews, and the originals could be maintained locally, but it is not quite the same.   Also, I am not at all clear on the complete process of coming from the cloud to classic.  plus note that the classic + cloudy plan only has a small amount of storage, not 1TB, if I recall. 

I'm not trying to talk you into the switch, as there are a LOT of considerations.  It was just one data point.


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## clee01l

Ferguson said:


> So... Smugmug and LR Cloud are quite different, though both at some level allow you to display content to others. LR cloud is (in my mind) more about distributed editing. SM is about sharing content.


I would agree with that statement.   I use Amazon Photos for displaying photos publicly and locally on my FireTV.    I like the integration of Lightroom (cloudy) and Lightroom Classic for initially loading new images in the field (or downstairs) and having them show up with the iPadPro Lightroom edits in Classic.


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