I don't know why you think that they are linked. I know of no program that prevents you from deleting individual files. Of course, I have never worked with lightroom either. You should be able to delete them individually in lightroom or go to the folder they are in on 'my computer' and delete the ones you don't want. Or, buy a larger hard drive and keep them. Or, convert them to smaller files to save space.
I just bought a 1.5 Tb WDC 'my book essential' for $139.
Tom
In response to your question about deleting files, not sure what "old ones" refers to .... derivative files, originals, duplicates .... always think twice ... or maybe three or four times before deleting image files. House cleaning and tidying up is important, however, storage space is cheap and there is no need to delete files you may find a need for later on.
your backups are just that backups. at a certain point, they are too old to be useful. i keep at most two Lightroom backups and delete everything older. since the backups are a month apart, the last backup will be missing two months worth of updates.
why are all the back ups so different in size?? any idea's
Butch, thanks for the book suggestion I'll take a good look at it..
Tomh
Lightroom creates the back up files thats all I'm just worried about deleting them. I have not deleted originals so i think I'm going to go for it
That of course if anyone can answer the file size query..?
does the number of images in your catalog change much over a couple of months? the backup really contains the catalog and a few other files and not much else. i don't think it contains any of the previews and it certainly doesn't contain the image files. also, the catalog doesn't shrink in size even if you delete until it passes some threshold for free space and then it compacts. i manually run one periodically anyway because i have a moderately sized catalog, about 65K images that i add and delete from.
Herb...
MaximusW wrote:
why are all the back ups so different in size?? any idea's
I think you are doing incremental backups. Using that method, only the new or changed files are backed up. That is why the file sizes vary. Here is what you can do. First, do a FULL backup. Than you can delete all of the incremental files that you have (at some point in the future after you have two full verified backups). A good practice would be to do a full backup once a month (or every other week) and do small incremental backups between these. Keep only two or three generations of files. [NOTE: When you are doing incremental backups, you can not just delete the smaller files of various sizes. If you do, then you are deleting your backup.]
If you ARE doing an incremental backup then DO NOT delete the Orginal backup as that contains ALL your dat the later backups only the changes. These changes look toward the original when/if you restore.
If you start another backup (full) then test it and then you can delete the old one
