Re: Lightroom back ups

[Lea Murphy <lea@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Dec 12, 2011, at 11:56 PM, mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Not on a Mac, but PC is photo use only.

I don't know about PC backup software but in my experience you want cloning software...full copies of the data without a bunch of other stuff going on in the background.

Images are on other drives, but they will not be the same drive that I use for my light room.

Your images can be drawn from wherever you like. Lightroom tracks them. In your Library module you'll see, running down the left side, a list of all the source drives you've ever imported images from. If the drive is not connected you can still access thumbs but you'll get a notice that the image is not available. At that point I connect the drive to access the image...I've never altered an image that was shown to be missing. Can that even be done?

I am no fan of back up software.

You might consider changing that. I'm pretty sure others have suggested PC backup software that can be set and left to do its own thing painlessly.

I have had more problems with them than dealing with a drive crash manually. 

Perhaps now, but as your catalog grows that may not stay true.

The 1 T drive can be recreated, and soon there will be another drive that is as large that will closely mirror the first, but won't light room be looking for the original drive rather than the backup IF that primary drive suddenly melts???

I've not had to do this (thankfully) but it seems you should be able to point Lightroom to find the catalog on a new drive. The hitch might be if they 'closely mirror' or exactly mirror each other. I'd hedge my bets in my favor and have an exact mirror. Any images missing would show up as missing and should allow you to manually locate them and repoint Lightroom to them. The manual part of that last sentence is the real drag.

Can I plug another drive into Lightroom, and will it find images in my catalog even if its NOT the same hard drive (which melted) where they were located in the first place or an exact copy of the original drive?  The file names should match, that is unless lightroom changed them.  Yet will LR find them?

Not unless you direct LR to the new drive. Once you do it wil/should find any images that exist in the new place. Caveat: the file structure has to be an exact match or LR will get tangled up and be unable to locate the duplicate then you'll have to manually redirect LR to them. A tedious job unless you've only got a few to do.

Lea

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Lightroom back ups
From: Lea Murphy <lea@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, December 12, 2011 10:47 pm
To: List for Photo/Imaging Educators - Professionals - Students
<photoforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Mark, I'm not at all clear on what you're talking about but you should seriously consider backup software that will clone the 1T drive at least daily. 

You can create a backup of your catalog but if you lose your images due to a drive crash an empty catalog, keywords or not, won't be of much use. 

When you exit LR it will ask if you want to back up. I'd say yes to that once or twice a week. Or more, depending on how much work you do.

If you're on a mac I recommend SuperDuper. Works like a charm. 

Lea

the most wonderful things in life aren't things 

On Dec 12, 2011, at 10:35 PM, mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Backing up my photos is something I am particularly careful with.  Everything else, not so much.  All my photos are on at least 2 hard drives, but here is the issue.  My primary hard drive is about a 1 tb or so and nearly everything is on there.  I think the catalog came up to somewhere around 25,000 images or so.  Trouble is that the other drive is scattered over several smaller drives, who's contents made the larger drive later.

Made my lightroom catalog on the larger drive.  Yet what if that drive crashes and becomes useless.  I don't want to go through keywording all the files only to have the drive crash, light room not be able to find the images where they were so the keywords are now useless (even if the catalog was backed up).  I really do not want to do the keyword thing twice.  If I plug in another drive that has images in the light room catalog, how does it find it on another disk?

Thanks in advance for all the help.  Love the toning settings in lightroom.  So far its my favorite new feature.

Mark

your kids . my camera . we'll click
www.leamurphy.com