Help with my iMac setup and moving to a bigger one

[mike-parkandbridge]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom Classic 9.3

Operating System

1. macOS 10.15 Catalina

Hi.
I currently use a 27inch 2019 iMac with a 1TB drive.
My LR Classic subscription based setup is on here.
I have it backed up to an external drive and this is backed up to backblaze.
But I'm running out of space and want to move my photos (but not my catalog) to an external drive.
Can someone please point me to a page or document that explains how to do this?
Also, do I need a desktop raid or is a big external HD backed up to backblaze (with the LR catalog and stuff on my iMac) ok?
Thanks
Mike

 

[Paul McFarlane]

Hi Mike

This will give you the method:

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/move-photos-another-hard-drive-leaving-catalog/

 

[flyfifer]

Also, do I need a desktop raid or is a big external HD backed up to backblaze (with the LR catalog and stuff on my iMac) ok?

There are a few factors that influence this decision, the main two being how quickly do you want to recover and how much do you trust your backup provider. If you have a lot of images, it may take a long time to recover because of bandwidth restrictions that your backup provider imposes.

Personally, I do both. My images sit on a WD PR4100 NAS that is configured to RAID 5. That way, a single drive failure doesn't cause me any issues and I still maintain access to all of my images. But I also back up the images on my NAS to AWS Glacier on a nightly basis. That way, I'm still covered for any catastrophic failure on my NAS. The worst case would be the loss of images from the last day but I never reformat memory cards until they are next used so I've always got another backup route for those.

 

[clee01l]

Also, do I need a desktop raid or is a big external HD backed up to backblaze (with the LR catalog and stuff on my iMac) ok?

RAID (especially RAID0 or RAID1) is not really a requirement in a consumer environment unless you need 7X24 uptime for your data. This is rarely the case for non commercial installs and certainly not a benefit for Lightroom. RAID is not a backup solution since every data file error is replicated across the RAID environment. Proprietary RAID using Proprietary filesystems are particularly difficult to recover when the single point of hardware failure happens to be the proprietary RAID controller.

My recommendation would be to put money you might spend on RAID into SSD EHDs or multiple EHD backup drives.

 

[mike-parkandbridge]

Thank you all for your advice. I think my upgrade path is going to be
1. Buy a large external drive, probably SSD, and back up to Backblaze
2. Wait until Apple brings out it's new ARM based Macs next year
3. Buy one with SSD internal drive, upgrade the memory and graphics card

Thanks again
Mike

 

[tsinsf]

As you know, SSD drives are very expensive, especially Thunderbolt 3 ones. How "large" is large for you? I have 6 TB of photos, so an SSD is not a reasonable option. I keep my photos on an external spinning HD connect via USB 3, and backup to another spinning HD and to Backblaze.. The lightroom catologue and app still reside on my boot drive (2013 Mac Pro trashcan). It's plenty fast enough for me. I'm not sure out much faster having your photos on an external SSD would be compared to having them on a USB connected spinning drive. Opening and saving large files will be somewhat slower (not sure how much), but I doubt editing itself will be that much slower.