Archiving LR PP'd shots - will I lose my edits?

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bulb763

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Jon
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Right, I want to remove all the RAW files I have built up over the past year on my hard drive and put them onto DVD. Easy enough I thought, just get a load of DVDs and burn as much as I can onto each one.

Now that I have the DVDs though, I have thought about how Lightroom is going to deal with it all. I do the majority of my PP work with it, and I find it very good at organising the shots. I don't have to generate a huge TIFF file for each shot after I've PP'd it - I just export a shot from LR at whatever size, as and when I need it.

I'm not too sure about exactly how LR remembers all the PP I do to each shot, but I do know that it doesn't edit the actual RAW files. Perhaps someone can explain this :shrug:

So, if I burn all the RAWs onto DVD, will I lose all the PP that I have done to them? Obviously, I don't want this to happen, so is there any steps I should take to avoid it? Sorry if the question is a little vague :D, maybe if I knew how LR worked I could phrase it better :bonk:
 
LR stores the changes in its database. If the raw file goes missing LR will complain it can't find it but you won't lose the edits. As well as backing up the raw files I'd back up the LR database as well and keep them together.
 
Whilst we are on the subject of LR......I think it works a bit like the organiser in Elements, in that it holds a thumbnail of your image, but not the image itself....is that right? I have found Elements crashes all the time if I keep lots of thumbnails in organiser....have to empty it every so often.....does LR have similar issues or can it hold everything you have?

I'm wondering if I should move to LR, or just stick to Elements. I like what I have read in mags etc, but wonder if I would be wasting my money?? Anyone able to advise me?
 
LR stores a preview image in a folder along with the database file, I've not had any problems with crashing even in a database with 30,000 images but large databases do slow it down a bit - I just split my database into several smaller sections and there was a noticable speed up in the UI.
 
There's a very good video tutorial on how to achive this. Unfortunately it's on my other PC and I don't have a link to the original site on this one. If I remember I'll dig it out when I get home.
 
rpstewart said:
There's a very good video tutorial on how to achive this. Unfortunately it's on my other PC and I don't have a link to the original site on this one. If I remember I'll dig it out when I get home.
Click to expand...

That would be very handy, Stewart. Thanks :)
 
Be very careful backing up your shots onto DVD's if you're going to delete them afterwards. I did this about a year ago, made 2 copies of each, checked both were readable then deleted them from my HD. About 3 months ago I tried to get some of them back but both copies were unreadable. I lost a whole months worth of raw files. Fortunately I still have the Tiffs but I swear I will never just use DVD's again. 2 seperate HD copies and DVDs for me now.
 
That video is for v1.0, a lot changed with v1.1 as you can now export selected photos to a new catalogue and back up that way, here's what you do.

In the Library module select all the photos you want to archive
Then select File > Export as a Catalogue... from the menu
In the file box that opens choose where you want to back up the folder to and make sure you have Export Negative Files ticked.

LR will then create a new database with the name you gave and copy all the raw files across as well - you end up with a self-contained backup of the photos you selected along with all the edit and database info. To access the backup restore it to your HD and then just open the catalogue file and everything's back.
 
Thanks for the help chaps. The video was useful :thumbs:

Gandhi said:
Be very careful backing up your shots onto DVD's if you're going to delete them afterwards. I did this about a year ago, made 2 copies of each, checked both were readable then deleted them from my HD.
Click to expand...

This is exactly what I was going to do. Using Verbatim DVD-Rs as per some recommendations on this thread. I do have an external HD, but I was intending on continuing using that as I do now - to backup my HD. I'll give some more thought though ;)
 
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