I do know that fiddling with stuff in LR is non-destructive to the original raw data, as only the settings themselves are changed.
With CR2 files, LR writes an XML file with the same base name, and doesn't write to the image file.
But with DNG, the settings are saved in the DNG file itself. Does this give anyone else a less-confidant feeling about the image data preservation? I'm thinking that it will affect the volume snapshot (backups) size if the large file is rewritten instead of only a small file being written. Does it resave the entire file thus taking up more network bandwidth, or is that info arranged at the end or have a fixed position to overwrite, or otherwise only change some of the bytes in the existing file as opposed to saving the whole file? This is also a problem if I make the original image files read-only!
Does anyone know more about it? Can I somehow keep it separate in DNG like it does with other formats?