Lightroom v5 Backup

I may be looking at impending hard disk failure on my 5 year old Mac which is intermittently, but quite often, running slow and giving me the spinning wheel of death.

I have all my photos backed up on a separate external drive but it occurred to me that these will be the original versions, not those I've improved/tampered with on Lightroom.

Could any kind forumite point me to the files(s) that contain the info that turns the original into the Lightroom'd version? Is it by any chance the catalog that backs up every week or is it something else?

Thanks in advance

Yes - it's the catalog backup (the files has the .lrcat extension) that it the single most important file on your hard disk. It contains details of every change made to every photo. I thought I had lost mine years ago and managed to recover it. That was on an old mac before Time Machine came on the scene.

As your Mac is only five years old, why not use the inbuilt Time Machine software on the Mac and get yourself a cheap USB hard drive and you can sleep easy. The feeling you get when a disc fails and your data is safe with Time Machine is priceless. It's one of the reasons I love my Mac.

Feel free to ask for any more help.

Or better still, CATALOGUE, we are English afterall.

Thanks for the reply Tigershoot. I do use Time Machine backed up onto an external Firewire drive so the ircat file should be there. I've made another copy just to be sure.

Still haven't got to the bottom of the intermittent lock ups but that's probably best in another forum.

Click on "Enter Time Machine" and you can magically go back in time and see the file.