Lightroom 4 keeps asking to backup every time i try closing

Question

Lightroom keeps asking me to Backup everytime i try closing it! What do i do? Ignore or backup?

Answer 1

The subject of “Backup” has come up a couple of times in the last few days and although I’m not claiming to be the fountain of wisdom on the subject, I felt I should write a few words about it.
Web-weaver has given some wise words about it above, but I would urge anyone (YOU) to consider this issue for yourself as it is definitely not a “one size fits all situation”. 
In summary, if you read no further, you should spend a little time and think it through it for yourself with regards to what are your risks, probabilities and consequences of a disaster and what are the possible disasters anyway.   In fact I wish people would stop calling it “backup” as some might take the view of “I’ve done a backup - so job done”.   It should actually be called “Disaster Recovery” which really focuses on what you are trying to achieve.
------>
Disasters come in many forms and are not just had disk failures.    Examples include Hardware Failure, Virus Attack, deliberate sabotage by disgruntled staff, Fire, Flood, Theft, un-noticed cockups by yourself, bad software upgrades and Meteorite’s falling on your house!  In my career I (not to me personally - that would be unlucky!) have seen all of these things  except the last one!  I know of photographers who mitigate the risk of ALL of these things, but clearly it is up to you to assess your acceptable risk, your environment and acceptable levels of consequences.
For a simple example, consider if backing up to an external hard drive permanently sat on top of your PC, you may live in a house with a laser trip wire alarm system or have a pet leopard so perhaps less risk, but if you are backing up to an external hard drive sitting on top of your PC then there is a good chance a thief or fire will take both your PC and external drive.    Equipment is insured – good!   But no insurer can give you back your photos or any of your other important non-photography digital stuff.    Similarly for Fire, Flood and potential hard disk wiping virus attack.   A virus might not see your external hard drive as something different and be nice and kind to it!
When I am on the road with a PC/laptop I backup to an external hard drive at the end of each day and physically locate the hard drive somewhere else hidden to avoid theft.   At home I have extended my network into a separate out building and have a Network Attached Raid Storage (NAS) in the loft space – away from Fire, Flood and Theft.   I also periodically copy to another drive (Paranoid – perhaps!).   I’m not saying you must do this, simply what I feel comfortable with.
The second part of any disaster recovery solution is your retention policy.   It has been advised in the previous post by Web-weaver to take backup every time you leave Lightroom if you have done some changes.   This is fine (not how I work), but consider that each time you do this you will create a new backup file in addition to all the previous ones, and they build up.     For one of my catalogues each backup takes 1.5GB of storage so if I were to backup every time I exit (10 times a day) I would consume 465Gb per month.   This is clearly unsustainable (for most users) so you will need to delete some of the backups occasionally.   But how much do you keep and when?  This is up to you.   
There is however a class of disaster that, although rare, may be important here – the “I’ve messed up my data but gone unnoticed scenario”.   For example you discover that a month ago you did something affecting not one image but a large number of them and didn’t notice and you can’t easily correct it.   Although more complex to recover, keeping some older backups may give you more options to recover the situation.     On tidying up the backup files, I generally will keep backups from each day from the last couple of weeks and at least one per month over the last 4 or 5 months.     I am not saying I am correct, but I’m saying it is something that needs thinking about.   Don’t just keep the last backup and also importantly, from time to time check your backups are actually happening.      I had a multi-million pound customer who unknowingly messed up their data (not Lightroom) and wanted to roll back two months only to find all the backup files had a size of 0 (Zero)!     Also keep a permanent backup each time you upgrade Lightroom in case you want to roll back.
If you want to take the time, effort and expense to move beyond simply “I’ve done a backup so I can sleep at night”, then create a situation where your backups are not simultaneously subject to the same risks as your main system, and this almost certainly means in different physical equipment and different physical locations.   I know that some pro-photographers backup to the internet.
The key message is - Only YOU can assess your environment, acceptable probabilities and acceptable consequences, but even if only 5 minutes over a coffee, assess it you should. And although good enough for many, don’t take at face value someone saying to just plug in an external hard drive and do backups.
Apologies to anyone who has wasted time reading this and knows it all, but it is not obvious to everyone, and for sure more than one person reading this will have had a “disaster”.   If this post helps one person think about it then it is perhaps worthwhile.
Alan.
PS – Low probability, but **** Happens!     A sad but slightly amusing tale – I had a customer (10 person firm) where thieves drove up in a van overnight, broke in and stole all the client PC’s.   Two nights later they came back and stole the network server and all the backup units.    Although not funny, my colleague and I joked that they would come back and steal the companies IT manager!