Scared the cr*p out of me

[ernie]

I have no clue how or why this happened, but....
I turned on my pc yesterday and about half the items on my desktop were missing, disappeared. And of course one of them was Lightroom. Well, I thought I'd just reboot, that often solves those weird things. No luck, now I'm getting concerned > . I looked for Lightroom in Programs, wasn't there. > > . Forgot it's in Documents, but I did a search for Lightroom and it all showed up so I was a little less worried. I was about to do a system restore, but for some reason I happened to look in a folder Vista creates labeled (your user name). In it was a folder named desktop, and sure enough there were all my items. I just drug them onto the desktop and all was well again .
The point of all this story is Thank God I always export finished files into their folders on the OS. If I had lost Lightroom I would have lost all the history and keywords and organization, but at least I'd have the "developed" images in their folders. I see the logic some propose of only exporting when needed, but this is why I don't think It's the better choice. That's my story.
Oh, if anyone knows why this all happened, I'd be glad to hear it.

 

[dj_paige]

[quote author=egd5 link=topic=8'69.msg55''2#msg55''2 date=125519''83]
The point of all this story is Thank God I always export finished files into their folders on the OS. If I had lost Lightroom I would have lost all the history and keywords and organization, but at least I'd have the "developed" images in their folders. I see the logic some propose of only exporting when needed, but this is why I don't think It's the better choice.[/quote]

Making regular backups of all of your data is another solution, that doesn't have the drawback of losing all the history and keywords and organization, and that doesn't have the drawback of you having to manually export your developed photos.

 

[b_gossweiler]

1) You have to differentiate between Shortcuts and Programs or Data. All you have on your Desktop are usually shortcuts to programs, and loosing those doesn't mean loosing the programs or the data belonging to the programs.

2) Making sure you don't loose your development work:
There are several options to save your development work done in LR:

• 
  [li]Make regular backups of your entire data, as dj_paige suggests[/li]
  [li]Backup your LR catalogs regularely, by chosing an appropriate option in the catalog settings (e.g. to an external HD)
  [/li]
  [li]Write your development settings to XMP Files, which reside where your original images are (Automatically write changes into XMP in Catalog Settings)[/li]
  [li]Make sure you have a backup of your original images somewhere (e.g. external HD)[/li]
  [li]Export catalogs (or parts of them) to another location, e.g. external HD
  [/li]
  [li]....
  [/li]

The options mentioned above can be used in combination, achieving more data availability.

Exporting the images (as JPGs) would not be the option I chose for saving development work, as you are limiting your ability to do additional work on them if necessary.

 

[ernie]

My catalog is backed up to an external drive. All images,including "finished" jpgs, are backed up to two ext hard drives, and one of them stays disconnected from pc until I just backup to it. I've been backing up the catalog monthly, I just changed that to weekly. And if I want to work on something again (very rare), I would use the raw.
Exporting finished images and including them in the catalog is just a matter of a few clicks, so no biggie. But it's all just a matter of opinion, no right or wrong.