Catalogs New Catalog and separate external drive for 2 week international travel - good or bad idea?

[Abbeycatt]

Lightroom Version Number

13.3

Operating System

1. macOS 14 Sonoma
2. iOS

I’m headed to the Faroe Islands for a two week photography tour in a couple of weeks. I currently have a MacBook Pro M2 w/2 TB internal SSD; I keep my LR catalog on my internal hard drive and keep my LR photos on an 8TB external drive with a back up to another 8TB drive plus use Backblaze as well.

I’m really concerned about taking my 8TB drive with me on this trip - even with all the backups I have. Would it make logistical and practical sense to create a separate LR Catalog on my hard drive and a clean external drive for photos for this trip and then combine when I get back home? Does anyone see a simpler solution?

What might I be missing. Thank you.

Roberta

 

[Gnits]

There are lots of options.

Do you think you have enough spare space on the internal SSD for your new travel pics.

If so, just leave your external 8tb drive at home and continue to use your existing catalog on the trip. It would be a simple exercise when you get home to transfer your travel pics to your external 8tb drive. Bring a fresh external drive with you to backup your catalog while travelling and your travel pics. Lr does not need to have the 8tb drive plugged in, the related images will be marked as missing, but will be ok once you plug in the 8tb drive when you get home.

If you do not have enough internal space for travel pics, then you can use your clean external drive for the pics, but then you will need a second drive for backups.

I use Samsung T7 drives when travelling. I use, say Blue disk for my new pics and use a Red disk for backups. One travels with me all the time, the second stays in the hotel safe. On the flight home one travels in my cabin bag and the second in the hold luggage.

Structure your travel pics under a single root folder, such as TravelPicsAug2024, to facilitate backups while travelling and transfer to 8tb drive when you get home.

 

[clee01l]

I think I would be inclined to continue to use the master catalog and import and store any new photos on the 2 TB internal SSD. When you return you can simply move these images to the 8TB EHD. (using LrC or Finder to do the move) Using Finder will mean that you need to reconnect the files that get moved with out telling LrC.

Also if you want to access the current inventory, you can create Smart Previews of these which will still give you access to these image even though the master image volume is disconnected.

 

[Abbeycatt]

These are both great and simple solutions - thank-you - I clearly am over thinking this as I normally travel with my external 8TB and use that and have done that for more trips than I can count - so it was beyond my thinking. I have about 1.2 TB of space on the MacBook so will go that route w/ an external smaller drive(s) for back up. So appreciate the solutions.

 

[clee01l]

These are both great and simple solutions - thank-you - I clearly am over thinking this as I normally travel with my external 8TB and use that and have done that for more trips than I can count - so it was beyond my thinking. I have about 1.2 TB of space on the MacBook so will go that route w/ an external smaller drive(s) for back up. So appreciate the solutions.

I have a portable 1TB drive that I can connect to my Ipad Pro for backups on trips. I don't make system backups on my images while traveling. Insteac I make a copy that goes on the portable drive, Another that gets imported and I hold one to the original camera cards and don't reformat them. This gives me three copies of the photos that I have taken.

Some years back, I replaced my MBP with a similarly sized iPadPro and use LR Mobile while traveling. When I have a decent internet connection my LR mobile sync to the Adobe Cloud providing one more copy of the images that I shoot on the trip.