Photo backups & Lightroom

futureal33

futureal33

Suspended / Banned
Messages
2,390
Name
Nick
Edit My Images
Yes
Hi all,

Ive spent a few hours on Google this afternoon looking for a specific answer, but still no luck - please could anyone who knows how to do this help me?

Basically I have a PC with 2 internal drives. 1 drive has Windows 7 and Photoshop and Lightroom installed on it, and nothing else. The other drive is 1TB and has everything else (music, photos, games etc).
I also have one external drive which is powered through mains, which I turn on maybe once a month and backup all my music and pictures to MANUALLY.

I would like to improve my process here, could anyone suggest a better way of doing things? Ideally I would like at least one level of data redundancy for my music and photos, Lightroom Catalog file, and if possible I would like this done automatically in the background with no human input.

What would you suggest?
TIA
 
Right - the thing with Lightroom is that you'll have a catalogue location, cache location, the raw files, a backup location and your exported final jpeg images (maybe).
For best performance you need to move them onto different drives, but the important thing is the catalogue and backups. Note that if you have the default weekly backups it doesn't delete old copies so you need to be aware of you're backup location and delete a few occasionally else you'll use up lots of space.

Drives are relatively cheap these days. I have an internal one which I backup to (weekly on a scheduled job) and an external USB one that gets manually backed upto with a batch file - click and run.

For a really good and simple but quick cmd line program, try robocopy (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17657). It will skip existing files so after the first big copy it's really quick. Stick it in a batch file and you can have multiple lines to backup your documents, profile, photo's etc.
 
I have an SSD with Lightoom and the catalogue and then a seperate 500GB drive with all the RAW files. Aswell as backing up my entire Pictures/documents folder daily using Windows home server to a NAS drive, I also use windows backup weekly to back up to a seperate drive in the PC.

I also then manually back up to and External USB drive and a external eSATA connected drive every 2 weeks or so.

In Lightroom, you also have the option of making copies of the RAW files to another drive upon import. So if you have a spare large drive, you can instantly backup every RAW photo you import through Lightroom.

I've tried the Like of Acronis backup, but TBH, its far easier for me the way I currently do it.
 
I have 3 600Gb hybrid drives, one for the OS, one for this years Raw files, one for the lightroom cache. Then I have a couple of 2tb drives, with the other years of raw files, mp3's etc on them. Then another 2tb drive internal just for a scheduled friday night backup.
Then an external 3tb usb disk for ad-hoc backups.

I looked at the SSD's but they were silly money for a decent size.

Windows 7 64 bit, 16gb memory and really not many apps as it's reserved for photography, just office on top.

However - top performance tip - get a 16gb usb stick, format it as ntfs and stick it in a spare usb slot and leave it there running readyboost. Just adds a little crispness on a fast system, or doubled the speed on my old slow laptop.
 
I don't mean to hijack this thread but @Tom - are you running Windows Home Server on a seperate 'server' as well as using a NAS? I'm still in the process of deciding to either go down the route of a WHS pc or NAS.
 
Its a media box pc thing, so yeah its a seperate PC, but I only use it as a NAS really. It was given to me for use as a home entertainment station, but Im not into that. Although I have got all my music on there too, so I can stream my music off any PC in the house which is handy.
 
Byker28i said:
Right - the thing with Lightroom is that you'll have a catalogue location, cache location, the raw files, a backup location and your exported final jpeg images (maybe).
Click to expand...

where about is the default location.
 
My system runs NovaBackup which does an incrimental backup every hour, it only takes 10 minutes and isn't noticable on system performance so why not only have an hours work in the firing line, NovaBackup also does a full dump to NAS every night, I also have LR duplicate all RAW's to a second drive on import and have offsite storage through Carbonite.

You can never have too many backups.
 
I always find this a difficult topic, because there's so many ways to do it.

One thing I think is a must though is an off-site backup. About once a year I burn some blu-rays with all my RAWs plus catalogue etc and put em in a draw in my parents loft. Two houses would have to burn down or be burgled within a short space of time for me to lose my pics. It's a sensible precaution that's not too expensive or time consuming. This is in addition to regular backup to an external disk.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top