Lightroom Catalogs

[valray]

I know this is a slideshow forum but I get so much help on my PSP questions I though I would take a crack at a LR question. I'm sure there are many of you here that use Lightroom so any help will be appreciated. My question is about how the lightroom catalog works. My default catalog is located in a folder called D:\LR\Catalog. Every week LR asks me if i want to backup my catalog and I say yes. It then creates a new folder named by the current date and time like D:\LR\2008-01-25. Now, my default catalog is about 300MB in size but each backup is only about 13MB. My question is this. If my Windows installation on the C:\ drive bombs and I have to reinstall. Which catalog would I use to get back to where I was before the crash. is there different data in the 2 catalogs? Do I have to do some kind of merge? is the small backup just a way of pointing LR back to my original catalog? Is the small backup just an incremental back of changes since the last backup, if so how the heck would I get all my changes back into LR? Thanks.

[JC Profile Private message]

The backup that is being conducted weekly is not a backup of the image files, it is only a backup of the LR internal database in which LR stores all of the instuctions and other info relative to the actual image files.

Backing up the images is another matter. You can do that manually or by checking the back-up box and designating a location in the IMPORT dialog box when you import new images.