Need help in backing up LR Catalog, etc.

My Win XP computer recently crashed.?I had all my photos backed up on an external drive, but lost ALL of my LR catalog, development settings, ratings, presets, preferences, etc.?That's a big deal with 20,000+ RAW images.

I want to prevent that in the future and have a backup. I keep my images on a separate data drive in my computer (which I back up to an external HDD regularly).

Can I set up LR2.3 (and eventually 2.4) so the LR catalog, development settings, ratings, preferences, presets and other critical settings reside on my Data drive??Is this a good or bad idea?

If it is a good idea, exactly how do I do that?

Thanks,

Lou

Need help in backing up LR Catalog, etc.

You certainly can have your catalog on an external drive.?The key thing is to have a back up catalog on a different drive from where the active one lives. This suggests a full backup strategy that keeps copies of just about everything on a separate drive.?My immediate backup of the catalog happens on the internal drive, but is soon backed up over all, along with any image addtions, to a separate drive.

If you don't have any way to recover your previous catalog, and I feel for your loss, you can just create a new one, and set its location in the ensuing dialog. Then you'd set LR to backup the catalog periodically. Mine are daily.