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Transferring all catalogues and images from external drive to new external drive

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Michael Fisher

mickfish
Joined
Oct 24, 2017
Messages
9
Location
Sydney Australia
Lightroom Experience
Advanced
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
Classic 7.3
Operating System
I have all my images and LR catalogues (yes I started life in LR with separate catalogues for large shoots) on an external drive using 3.5GB. I am running out of space so I have bought an external Raid 1 drive (2 x 8TB).
I am running the new CC Classic.
Some folders of images have their own dedicated LR Catalogue.
Some folders are Parent folders (such as my “Travel” folder) which sub-folders of each destination and each has its own related Catalogue.
Then I started a master catalogue linking to to several folders.

I am also concerned that I will loose the collections I have created- e.g within my travel folders I will have catalogues of picks or those images images designated for a photobook.
I do have a utility, “Back-up Guru” that I could use to copy the images to the new Raid drive.

I wish to avoid disaster.
And I guess I should I first upgrade the catalogues to Classic before doing the move?

What is the recommend approach to tackling this?
 
Some good advice in this thread (including a reference to Victoria's recommendations on this midway down) How do I move my pictures to external hard drive? | Adobe Community
My quick read of it is that for large multi-folder transfers better to move using Windows or Mac file transfer, keep the exact same folder structure on the new drive (ideally with just ONE parent folder, may want to rearrange that on old drive first) and then update file location with Lightroom. Copy the files rather than moving them, then delete later (assuming you need to) once everything confirmed to be working
 
With your Mac, you can simply clone the old drive and give the volume the same name as the old one. Unplug or rename the old drive and restart LR.

I will point out that a RAID 2X8TB may mean that you have two 4TB Drives configured as RAID0 or RAID1. RAID is not a necessary requirement unless you need 24X7 availability for the data. RAID is not a backup either. If the RAID uses a proprietary filesystem, you lose access to all of the data on both disks when the RAID controller fails.
 
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