- Joined
- Sep 28, 2008
- Messages
- 737
- Location
- Tacoma, WA
- Lightroom Experience
- Intermediate
- Lightroom Version
- Classic
- Lightroom Version Number
- 9.3
- Operating System
- macOS 10.15 Catalina
- iOS
I'm curious about whether folks archive original images, and if so, how they do this.
I've been a religious maker of backups (both local and in the cloud) for years, and I feel quite comfortable with what I'm doing to keep multiple copies of the current state of my photo data, to protect myself against casualties ranging from drive failure and user idiocy (e.g., deleting something I shouldn't have) to flood and fire.
But, what I have come to realize that I don't have a good system for archiving originals of my photos and videos. I have done it in a rather inconsistent and haphazard way for a while (though at the time I didn't think my method-de-jour was so bad). This means that if I discover that an original image has succumbed to bit rot, or even to my having accidentally deleted an original that I didn't intend do, but didn't notice for months or years, I won't have an easy time recovering the original. I most likely have copies of originals for the vast majority of images, but in some cases I have multiple copies, theoretically identical, but in some cases I doubt that's true. Finding the original will be in many cases the electronic version of rummaging through drawers for something that one knows one has SOMEwhere, but one just can't remember exactly where.
I don't think it's worth the time to straighten out the mess of the past, but moving forward, I'd like to develop a system that I can keep up consistently.
I'd love to hear about what others do with respecting to archiving originals.
[I should probably mention that I shoot exclusively RAW, but I also take into LR photos shot on my wife's iPhone (via syncing with Adobe Cloud). I also rename images upon import (or after import, in the case of iPhone images), using YYYY-MM-DAY-OriginalFileNameOfPhoto]
I've been a religious maker of backups (both local and in the cloud) for years, and I feel quite comfortable with what I'm doing to keep multiple copies of the current state of my photo data, to protect myself against casualties ranging from drive failure and user idiocy (e.g., deleting something I shouldn't have) to flood and fire.
But, what I have come to realize that I don't have a good system for archiving originals of my photos and videos. I have done it in a rather inconsistent and haphazard way for a while (though at the time I didn't think my method-de-jour was so bad). This means that if I discover that an original image has succumbed to bit rot, or even to my having accidentally deleted an original that I didn't intend do, but didn't notice for months or years, I won't have an easy time recovering the original. I most likely have copies of originals for the vast majority of images, but in some cases I have multiple copies, theoretically identical, but in some cases I doubt that's true. Finding the original will be in many cases the electronic version of rummaging through drawers for something that one knows one has SOMEwhere, but one just can't remember exactly where.
I don't think it's worth the time to straighten out the mess of the past, but moving forward, I'd like to develop a system that I can keep up consistently.
I'd love to hear about what others do with respecting to archiving originals.
[I should probably mention that I shoot exclusively RAW, but I also take into LR photos shot on my wife's iPhone (via syncing with Adobe Cloud). I also rename images upon import (or after import, in the case of iPhone images), using YYYY-MM-DAY-OriginalFileNameOfPhoto]