Lightroom Storage and Backup for noob.

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ddenis2

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Hey, first time posting here. Nice forum.

Heres some background..ive been shooting RAW with my D2'' for the past 2 years, mostly extensive travel photography, and my Lightroom Library has grown to almost 15'gb, with 41'' pictures. Just moved it all to my new Macbook (no fw) and already more than 2/3 of my drive is gone. Ive never done any real backup of my photos and theyve always been on an internal drive. Currently all my pictures are stored in User/Pictures/Originals/-LR imports them from my camera and organizes them by date inside there (2''x/xxxx-xx-xx)

I have quite a bit of free time on my hands this weekend and wanted to clean up a bit. About to go out to best buy and pick up 2-3 external drives. Not really sure what to get and how to configure...

1) I want to get one drive just to run Time Machine. I know this is a bit out of the scope of this forum, but I just want a simple backup for the whole machine(I admin a server for a small business, running backupexec, multiple tape and disk drives, and to me Time Machine seems like a dream) For this ill probably get the cheapest, biggest, not bus powered drive I can get.

2)I want to move at least some, maybe all, of my raw photos to an external drive. Im thinking about taking out older pictures and putting them on a portable drive, so I can still travel with them, but keep previews on the internal drive. The one thing that concerns me is the speed of USB 2.', and losing track of where pictures are. This makes me want to put my entire folder of pictures on a portable drive, but again, I think speed would kill me editing real time.

Now if that takes care of storage, what about backup? If the entire library is on one drive, its easy to setup one of the numerous programs out there to copy to another drive. If theres two seperate locations of photos, this gets more difficult I assume.

Sorry for the incredibly lengthy read, but can you guys give me some ideas?
Really kind of lost here.

Thanks a million,
Dan
 
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1) I want to get one drive just to run Time Machine.
Buy a 1Tb desktop drive.



2) The one thing that concerns me is the speed of USB 2.', and losing track of where pictures are. This makes me want to put my entire folder of pictures on a portable drive, but again, I think speed would kill me editing real time.
Click to expand...

The speed of USB will not be an issue, buy a portable drive (Lacie rugged unit have worked for me). LR will keep track of your images.


Now if that takes care of storage, what about backup?
Click to expand...

Depends how much you worry about your data.

Lets assume you have:
Laptop drive 25'gb
1Tb desktop time machine drive
25'gb lacie portable.

Get either chronosync or superduper and buy three more drives:

25'gb, 1Tb, 25'gb.
Use the software to clone the drives, easy really.

There are two types of photographers -
Those who have lost images,
and those who will lose images.

It's how you recover from the disaster that matters.
 
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Welcome to the forum Dan!

Time Machine - yep, that makes sense, it's pretty handy. Exclude your LR catalog though, as it can cause corruption.

I'd then buy 2 drives - but possibly different brands just in case there was a dodgy batch. If you're only working on one machine, then I'd keep the catalog on the internal. I may keep current working files on the internal drive, but then move to the external once they're processed. Easily done.

I'd then use Chronosync to copy all of external to a second external - and also any files off the internal drive too. It's really easy to set up to back up to different folders on the backup drive.
 
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We're simul-posting again!!!
 
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Ha, ha yep multiposting in the same time frame, cool.

BTW Chronosync and superduper have demo downloads available.

I know superduper will do drive clones for free with no nagging, not sure on chronosync.
 
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Although I'm not new to LR, I haven't used the DAM aspects of it before. I've just been using it to develop raws. So I'm a noob at this part too. I'm thinking of starting to use LR as my DAM tool now and I've got a lot of questions.
Dan said his library is now 15'gb with 41'' pics. I thought LR only kept directions on where files were and what was done to them. Is this the norm for the size of a library? That seems like the whole files(maybe not big tiffs) could be kept in that. Ernie
 
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I would guess that Dan included all of his images, the catalog and preview files in his total.
Compared to the file sizes of images (IRO 3'MB for a 5Dmk2 RAW file), editing and all the DAM features are a small overhead.

I'm thinking of starting to use LR as my DAM tool now and I've got a lot of questions.
Click to expand...

Start asking :)
 
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"small overhead" -That's what I wanted to hear!
I will ask plenty in the next few days I imagine. I'm still trying to get it organized enough in my head to know what to ask. It's like a tornado going on up there now. Thanks.
 
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Ernie, as a *very rough rule of thumb, the catalog file should run 1'-2'kB per managed image. My main catalog is running 23,''' images at 54' MB for the catalog file, and approx 16'GB of image files. I have another large catalog with approximately the same sizes, which I am preparing for merging into the main.
 
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Brad, thanks. That sounds very reasonable for sizes.
Sid, my raw mkII files are 7 to 1' mb each depending on content. I just looked at some to verify.
I have Martin Evening's LR2 book and am reading through that now. But I'm a slow reader so I'll be a while. But the more I find out about the capabilities of LR for storage, the more I'm liking it.
 
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egd5 said:
Brad, thanks. That sounds very reasonable for sizes.
Sid, my raw mkII files are 7 to 1' mb each depending on content. I just looked at some to verify.
I have Martin Evening's LR2 book and am reading through that now. But I'm a slow reader so I'll be a while. But the more I find out about the capabilities of LR for storage, the more I'm liking it.
Click to expand...

My bad, should have read 5Dmk2. That's what happens when covering multiple fora !

Either way 1Dmk2 or 5Dmk2, the image is way bigger than the additional data.
 
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whoa...sorry about the 15'gb number, thats what I guessed it was. My originals folder is actually 7'gb, guess I went trigger happy and installed way too many programs on my new mac...
 
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