When you do ask lightroom to backup your catalogue, this isn’t saving extra copies of your original photographs. LightRoom is saving the data about the edits you have made to those photos.
Those photos which LightRoom reference to remains untouched. This also means that you want to have a extra copy of photos backup outside of your hard drive!
Essentially, there are 3 backups when it comes to photo editing workflows.
photos you took and import into your PC
edit you make to those imported photos (as “Catalogue” in Adobe LightRoom)
edited photos you chose to exported and shared on Flickr, IG
This catalogue ends with a .lrcat like LightroomCatalog.lrcat. They generally are smaller in file size than a photo in RAW file format.
In the screenshots below, the 14.7MB LightRoom Catalog “points” to a folder of 1,165 photos at a staggering 6.57GB.
