Lightroom Classic CC Deleting Catalogs From Hard Drive

[Lost Hiker]

I am trying to learn a different, more effective and simpler way of organizing my work in the Adobe Photo Post Processing Suite of Apps.  At the moment, I am trying to get back in touch with Lightroom.  I have copied over my  original Lightroom folder in Windows File Explorer (Windows 10) to an external hard drive.  I would like to remove all the catalogs that are sitting on my laptop hard drive.  If I remove the data from the laptop, knowing it has been backed up on an external hard drive, will I be able to access the Lightroom folder on my external hard drive once I have removed it from my laptop?  I hope this makes sense.  I want to completely clear out everything pertaining to Lightroom that is sitting on the laptop and Lightroom and start from scratch, but want to be able to access the old materials should I choose to do so.  Thanks.

[F. McLion]

Yes, the catalog an be placed on an external disk. It can not be on a network drive though.

The original images can be on an external drive and on a network drive.

You did move the LR data folder (catalog and previews) only, right? You can not move the program folder.

Preference file and other file locations | Lightroom Classic CC and Lightroom 6

[Lost Hiker]

I was having so many problems with opening my older Lightroom Folders, etc. (said they needed Upgrades), that I threw up my hands in horror and I deleted everything (from Lightroom and my laptop hard drive), so now I can literally start from scratch.  I only have one catalog on an external hard drive that I worked with when I was taking a photography class at a local community college three years ago.  The original RAW images are stored on my external hard drive, so I have the pictures.  Now, it is a question of how best to organize images for photo editing.  I am working with an online tutorial from an avid outdoors photographer, and he seems to have a rather streamlined approach to photo organization.  I do not know what Julianne Kost would think about it, but this guys likes to keep things simple, and that's enough to keep me happy.  I need to clear off the one file I have on my external hard drive so that it is clean, too and then create a special folder on the external hard drive to move things to.  Thanks for listening and responding.