Question on Moving to External Drive

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RawHope

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Hello. I'm new here. :) I want to move all my photos off of my internal hard drive to an external drive. I'm pretty clueless when it comes to this stuff. I just finished moving the actual photos onto the drive. Now.... Should I also move Catalog.lrcat and CatalogPreviews.lrdata as well??? I have no idea if this is right. Do you guys do that or keep those files on your internal hard drive?

If I ever have a computer crash, I just want to plug in the external drive to another computer with Lightroom and be all set.

Thank you!
 
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You have not provided much detail about your system, however I would recommend the following.

a. Move your photo files to the external drive.

b. Retain the catalog, previews, presets, and other Lightroom files in the default folder on the internal drive. By default it places these files in the "user"/ Pictures/ lightroom folder. This would provide better performance since LR reads and writes to these files continusly while you are using the program no changes are made to your original files.

c. Backup your catalog file regularly to the external drive, you can also write your edits/ metadata to xmp sidecars or within dng files if that is your choice.

d. You will also have to make a backup of your external drive in the event that drive were to fail.

e. The other alternative is to have a second internal drive for your photos etc and use the external drive as backup.
 
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I agree with all that Denis has stated.

Just one word about the crash scenario mostlikely (if at all) to happen:

The single most failing hardware components on PCs are HDDs and power supplies. So don't feel too secure by having your images on an external drive, they also can fail. So paragraphs c) and d) of Denis' post are very important!

And one word about moving the files:
If you have moved the files from outside of LR (by explorer), use Find Missing Folder ... to reconnect your images to the LR catalog, DO NOT RE-IMPORT the images!

Beat
 
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Thank you very much for the advice. I got confused because I've been searching the web and found some "experts" saying to put the catalog on an external drive and other people saying to leave it on the internal. I guess in a perfect world, everyone would have the same way of doing things because then I wouldn't have to choose which way is best! ha.

Yes, I now have two external hard drives so will have a backup of the external drive with all my photos on it. I'm kind of paranoid because I have read about the external drives dying so I think in addition to these two drives, I'd like to maybe use one of those online backup services...for example, carbonite or something similar. Do you guys use those as an extra backup as well??

In regards to what Denis said - "you can also write your edits/ metadata to xmp sidecars or within dng files if that is your choice." I have no idea what xmp sidecars are and don't know what you're talking about with the dng files. I'm very new to Lightroom and all this technical-jargon. Are these additional ways to back things up?

Thanks. :-)
 
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One other point of clarification. External drives can be USB/SATA/Firewire attached or can be a drive on a network server. The assumption that has been made so far is that your drives are attached to the computer not accessed through a network. Attaching via ethernet cable or 8'2.11g/n is fine for the image files. LR does not allow the catalog to be on a network drive.

If I might offer another suggestion. In the same catalog, you can have part of your files on an external drive and part on the same local drive that hosts the catalog. I keep a working set of images on my local drive and a larger group of older files on a network drive. (it could just as easily be a USB drive) As the woirking set gets worked and ages for about 3 months, I periodically move these from the local drive to the remote drive. It keeps my most frequently accessed images (the newest) on the fastest path and the less often accessed images on the slower connection. The catalog manages everything and is quite happy with the arrangement. And I can still rework an older image if I need to without too much of a speed penalty (In truth I don't even see a lag for the files on the netwprk server.)
 
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Rawhope,
Just letting you know you're not the only "amateur" out there :D I've been using Lightroom 2 since August ''9 and still feel very overwhelmed at times. However, keep reading on the forums, especially this one, which I find the most useful and friendly. You'll catch on to some of these "catch words" later.
To answer some of your follow up questions, in a simple way: DNG refers to a file format (like NEF, Jpg, etc.), but it was created to be a universal container for all the "stuff" that goes along with your image files.
One of the most important pieces of "stuff" you have that you might not even know about are xmp, aka "sidecar" files. These are small text files that are a basic set of instructions that Lightroom (and other digital photo programs) uses to tell your computer how to render your image. It is these sidecar files that allow users to made "edits" in lightroom without touching/degrading their original files. For example, if you import a RAW file into LR, and then you develop it- say, lighten up the exposure, add more red tint to it, etc.- that information is stored in the xmp file.

I hope this is a small help to you in your quest to understand your digital photo files!

Dawn D. in NJ
"NJHeart2Heart"
 
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Welcome to the forums RawHope!

Lightroom is keeping all development data in its database. XMPs are optional and only needed if you use another program with Lightroom. For example, you can develop in Lightroom, write XMP to file, open a Geotagging software which will add the info to the XMP and back in Lightroom, you "Read Metadata from File" to bring the Latitude Longitude into Lightroom.

Some use them as a secondary mean of backing up Lightroom's data but the XMPs do not contain everything.
 
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Thank you all for the helpful replies. I appreciate your time. :) It's nice to know I'm not the only LR "newbie" around here. I will definitely be reading the forums to learn more about this program. So far, I LOVE LR. I just finally understood the whole catalog thing and how LR works the other day!!

Thanks again.
 
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