As a tip that has come up again on Twitter, I thought I’d put it in the blog. This came via a tweet from Victoria Bampton originally.

By default Lightroom only store information about Virtual Copies in the catalog. This is a pain if you lose the catalog, or want to access the Virtual Copy outside Lightroom. Fortunately there is a work around. When you get your Virtual Copy to the finish point, save a Snapshot. If you now go back to the Master/Original image from which you created the copy, you’ll notice the Snapshot is also available to the Master. This means the settings from the Virtual Copy are easy to recreate even if you lose the catalog without a recent enough backup.