Photo Back-up

[Mrdavie]

Lightroom Version Number

9.4

Operating System

1. Windows 10

I wish I had perfect recall. Then, when I unplug all the wires from my stereo system (to remove all the accumulated dust from behind the cabinet), I could remember how to hook the wires up. Similarly, after determining a backup strategy for my photos folder, I could remember what my strategy was so I cold revisit it, to determine if it is still the best strategy.
What started me on this trail (again) was hearing my hard drives spinning continuously throughout the night despite the fact that I have done little photo editing in the last six months. I do not need my hard drives to serve as noise machines.
Today I scrubbed my backups and started a new schedule beginning with a full backup. I really only need one full backup. Therefore, my program will do a weekly backup, which has to be a differential backup (only backs up new or changed files) because my program requires the first backup of the week to be full or differential. If I were to schedule more than one backup per week, the subsequent backups for that week could be incremental. Lord, help me! If you have any suggestions, I am all eyes (for reading your comments).

 

[Paul_DS256]

What started me on this trail (again) was hearing my hard drives spinning continuously throughout the night

Check your Windows Power Options to make sure you allow you disks to spin down when not in use.

I really only need one full backup. Therefore, my program will do a weekly backup, which has to be a differential backup (only backs up new or changed files) because my program requires the first backup of the week to be full or differential.

What are you using to do the backup? I run my differential backup of pictures and LR files nightly to an external hard drive. For differential, no reason you can't run nightly. Weekly, I have a special backup which finds my 'picked' pictures and backs those up to a cloud account.

my program requires the first backup of the week to be full or differential.

Not sure what you mean by this.

 

[Califdan]

I would be concerned about any hard drive that was loud enough to hear more than a few inches away. The problem may not be your backup strategy but rather a failing drive that must write each block many times before it gets a clean save.

 

[PhilBurton]

I would be concerned about any hard drive that was loud enough to hear more than a few inches away. The problem may not be your backup strategy but rather a failing drive that must write each block many times before it gets a clean save.

Or the noise might be from the bearings that allow the drive to spin. Bearings do fail, but over time. You don't want to wait until the bearing seizes up and the drive simply can't spin at all. Think about the value of your time compared to the ever-decreasing cost of external hard drives.

Phil Burton

 

[GregJ]

What backup do you use? You should not be backing up anything but your data files. No need to ever backup your OS or programs in the the year 2020. You should backup your image folder to an external drive at least twice. I simply do a sync using GoodSync, so I essentially have external drives that are exact duplicates of my primary drive which has my huge pictures folder on it. Also, your system sounds suspect and your hard drive sounds very suspect. hard drives are cheap. Get a new one. How big is your data? If it is less than a TB, use an SSD. You should not be booting off of a spinning hard drive. Not in the year 2020. How old is the PC? If it is 5 years old, time for a new one. You don't have to go high-end. You can get a really inexpensive PC today that is 4 times faster than the most expensive PC 4 years ago. This is my thing so I can give you decent advice no matter what your budget level. But I don't know what system you are running. But your backup routine sounds off to me.