In the spirit of this month’s theme – which is all about backing up your data – let’s talk about backing up your Adobe Lightroom presets today. I have recently tried to find all my Adobe Lightroom Presets so I can back them up and keep them safe just in case something crashes on me, so I thought I would share the steps you need to take to find them and back them up.

For those who may or may not be familiar with it: Adobe Lightroom is a super powerful image management application which is available for both Mac OS X and Windows. Photographers use it to manage hundreds and thousands of images, it also allows you to do post production work. Often in order to save some time and simplify your workflow, you can create time saving preset effects that you can use over and over. There are also web sites where you can download free professionally done presets: my favorite is Matt Kloskowski’s Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips or from companies like onOne Software who also offers over 140 free presets for Lightroom among others.

If you are using the latest Adobe Lightroom version or like me Lightroom 3 Beta (free download) and have a tone of presets in your Develop Module which you use and love, it is time to make sure you back them up somewhere, preferably offsite. I often use the old method of burning a CD as we as keep them offsite (on the server elsewhere) in the cloud using services like Drop Box and/or iDisk for extra piece of mind.

So where do you find your presets on your computer so you can back them up? If you are using Mac OS X, launch your Adobe Lightroom…

1. Go to ‘Preferences’ and select the second tab called ‘Presets’ as seen below.
2. Under ‘Location’ section you see long button called ‘Show Lightroom Presets Folder…’
3. Click on the ‘Show Lightroom Presets Folder…’
4. It will take you to your ‘Finder’ where you will see a folder called ‘Lightroom’
5. Click on it to open it and look for another folder called ‘Develop Presets’ – this is the folder where all your Adobe Lightroom Presets are located. You can copy this folder to burn it onto a CD or DVD to back it up or to paste it off site to places like DropBox or iDisk if you want.
6. You can also open it and will see the list of all the presents files which can you copy and back it up from there

If you have any questions about it or suggestions, please leave a comment below and I will be happy to add or update the above instructions. I am not using Windows, so if there are any differences for Windows users, please feel free to add them in the comment section as well. Thanks!