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Moving LR Files to external Drive

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Leonard704

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Premium Classic Member
Joined
Dec 27, 2012
Messages
76
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version Number
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 8.3.1 Release Camera Raw 11.3
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
I am moving LR to a new computer and I need to move about 4TB of image files to an external drive. See screen capture below. There is a total of about 60,000 files (1.8TB) on the drive shown in the screen shot. With the exception of LR2 Photos and Photo Library folders, only the folders on the WD3 – 2TB drive with a year as the folder name will be moved to the external drive. The other folders are not part of lightroom.

All the files and catalog are backed up. Is there a danger that in trying to move 60,000 files as a unit that LR will get confused somewhere during the move and loose or confuse links? Is there a better or safer way than drag and drop to do the move? Would it be better to break it up into smaller units?

Thank you,

Leonard

1582620094351.png
 
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You might also look at a tool like Teracopy. It can do a read-verify after write, to ensure that there are no transfer errors in moving that much data. Windows only detects hard errors (i.e. complete failures), there's no verification step in a windows explorer move. Alternatively run a checksum verify or just a differences (winmerge).

Very, very low probability of failure, but that's a lot of data and, well, it's an external drive (I'm in the minority perhaps but I just don't trust them to be as reliable). Belt and suspenders never hurts.
 
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Thank you for your suggestion about Teracopy. Unfortunately I completed moving the files overnight.
I'll look into for future file transfers. It doesn't look like it can validate the files except during the transmission.
 
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Leonard704 said:
Thank you for your suggestion about Teracopy. Unfortunately I completed moving the files overnight.
I'll look into for future file transfers. It doesn't look like it can validate the files except during the transmission.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that's more difficult. Given it is a very low probability problem I would not worry. If you are a bit OCD as I am (actually am CDO -- the letters need to be in order!) there's a tool out there called FCIV that lets you take checksums of all files. You can run it on both drives separately, then compare that result in something like winmerge (or even load it in excel if you are good at excel). Any difference in checksum is an invalid copy.

But... again, it's an extremely unlikely case that something corrupted during copy.
 
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I successfully moved the LR files to an external drive and installed LR on the new computer. I copied the catalog and presets to the new computer and attempted to load the catalog. LR said it needed to update the catalog and previews to work with LR Classic. I agreed and LR updated the files. It opened the catalog with the expected "?". When I pointed LR to the new external drive location it went through the motions, but the "?" remained. I then tried to point LR to the first folder location and I received the following error. "An internal error has occurred: ?:0: attempt to index field ‘source’ (a nil value)"
When I moved the files to the external drive I did not update the catalog since I was going to move the drive to the new computer right away. I'm not sure if that was a mistake or not.
Do you have any idea what I should try next? The original catalog and associated files are still in tact and safe.
Thanks
 
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Leonard704 said:
I successfully moved the LR files to an external drive and installed LR on the new computer. I copied the catalog and presets to the new computer and attempted to load the catalog. LR said it needed to update the catalog and previews to work with LR Classic. I agreed and LR updated the files. It opened the catalog with the expected "?". When I pointed LR to the new external drive location it went through the motions, but the "?" remained. I then tried to point LR to the first folder location and I received the following error. "An internal error has occurred: ?:0: attempt to index field ‘source’ (a nil value)"
When I moved the files to the external drive I did not update the catalog since I was going to move the drive to the new computer right away. I'm not sure if that was a mistake or not.
Do you have any idea what I should try next? The original catalog and associated files are still in tact and safe.
Thanks
Click to expand...

Problem Solved!! After closing and restarting LR I was able to point to the missing folders successfully.

Thanks
 
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