Archives and Backup Copies
January 29, 2009 | David Marx | Comments 23
Author’s Note: I have completely rewritten and updated this article. Please follow this link to the new version.
Professional-Grade Backup Plans
Filed Under: (02) Backup Advice • (12) FAQ • Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Tutorials
About the Author: David Marx is a digital photography instructor whose engaging teaching style inspires photographers of all skill levels. David is an Adobe Certified Lightroom Expert. To learn more about David's Adobe Photoshop Lightroom software training seminars and digital photography field workshops please visit 
Dear David,
I’m having a bit of trouble here, perhaps its on your videos I can no longer view for some reason.
I’m trying to do your system, having all pictures and a catalog on an external drive.
OK, I know I’m going to need to have another external hard drive to back up the first one.
First, how do I do that? Do I plug two external bus-powered hard drives into my MacBookPro at one time?
Can I “daisy chain” the two external hard drives? if so, that’s great.
But what’s a daisy chain?
Second, both external hard drives will have more usable room, but also more USED room, than my Mac will hold; is that a problem?
I won’t be able to save from my Mac since my work will be on one of the external hard drives, right?
I really want to get going on this, and things keep getting in the way; I’ll look forward to hearing from you, thank you for your help!
Barbara
Dear Barbara Reed,
I wonder why you cannot view our video tutorials right now? “Daisy chaining” is slang for connecting one Firewire drive to another. Good Firewire drives have multiple ports on the back so that each disk can act as the hub for another one. Since each drive can be the hub for the next disk there is no need for a dozen Firewire ports on your laptop. All that you need to do is plug one Firewire cable into the MacBookPro and then connect it to your primary photo storage external drive. Connect another Firewire cable from that drive to your backup disk. Turn everything on and all the drives should be connected. Easy!
USB disks, on the other hand, cannot be daisy chained. Each USB external drive needs to be connected to its own USB port either on the laptop itself or through a powered hub. This, plus its painfully slow data transfer rate, is one of the reasons why I try to avoid using USB connections for my external hard drives.
I think that you are a little confused on the free space / saving issue with your external drives. The whole reason to add these onto your system is because your Mac’s internal disk is inadequate. If I understand correctly you have reached the point where your internal drive cannot hold your entire body of photography, art, etc. Moving these files to an external drive–no matter what the external drive’s capacity–frees up space internally. I need to be clear in my language here though. Just copying the files from internal to external does not free up any drive space. The free space on the internal disk is not created until the old copy is completely deleted from that drive.
The process goes copy from internal to external, make sure the copy worked, then delete from the internal disk and empty the trash. Once the file’s are on the external drive Lightroom, and any program, can read and write to them. Which drive they live on does not change the operating systems ability to save. The ability to save, delete, rename, etc. is still there. The only difference is where these actions happen (internal vs. external drive.) Does that make sense?
I hope these answers help and please write me back if you need any additional guidance.
Best regards,
David Marx
So I am finally trying to make copies of all of my Ligthroom photos to both DVD’s and to another external storage drive, but I can’t seem to figure out how to burn copies of both the original file and the edited version. I don;t want to have to re-edit should anything happen so I want to have everything on DVD’s. Sure I could just burn .tiff’s but they wont have all the historical editing info. How can I do this?
Also, unfortunately, I never set up Lightroom properly as shown in your video with catalogs, although I formatted my external hard drive properly and all of my photos are stored on that external drive. Is there any way to go back and do this without destroying all of my files? I am just so scared.
I had a terrible system of storing all of my photos so in an attempt to make everything neat and clean and organized, I decided to go through all of my hard drives, rename things, moving things, deleting old things. I thought the best way to do this would be to delete my catalogs in lightroom and reimport everything. This way I wouldn’t have to go through the missing link situation. Now I’m realizing that that was a terrible idea because I’ve lost my color codes, flags, edits, etc. I have a lightroom catalog that was created on June 28, which is when I started to re-import things into lightroom, however, that catalog has since been modified. Is there a way to get lightroom to open the catalog from the day it was created? Or to import my photos into lightroom with all of its previous color codes and filters? I am kicking myself in the butt for this.
Dear JaimeN,
A couple of questions for you: 1. Have looked for your deleted Lightroom Catalogs in your computer’s trash can or recycle bin? If so can you restore them? Likewise, when did you last backup your hard drive? Are there copies of your Lightroom Catalogs on your backup disk? 2. Did you watch this tutorial on Lighroom’s Critical Preference Menus particularly the one on the importance of the “Automatically Write Changes to XMP” preference switch? It’s probably too little too late but if this switch had been turned on, or if you had found the Save Metadata buttons in the Library Module, then your color codes, keywords, and edits would have survived. Sadly, pick / reject flags, virtual copies, and collections are not stored at the metadata level so any work that you did with these features will be lost if you cannot recover those deleted catalogs.
Best of luck,
David Marx
I wanted to recommend a recent solution I found on the Windows side. I switched from a desktop to a laptop this year and had to change how I work with Lightroom and my catalog. My biggest concern was how to backup my library effectively. Then I stumbled on CrashPlan.com. I was using Carbonite to backup my desktop system to the cloud and a free program to do a second backup to an external drive. I liked how it worked in the background and was low maintenance. With CrashPlan I found some great things not offered by Carbonite:
1. It provides unlimited data for $5 per month or less
2. I can choose to pay $124 to have them send me a hard drive to seed my first backup on to and avoid waiting 3 months for all of my pictures to upload to their servers
3. It will handle my backup to an external hard drive as part of my backup plan.
4. It allows me to backup to another computer either at home or across the internet.
5. They have family plans so I can backup multiple computers at my home.
So in my case, I skipped the $124 and bought another external drive, created a seed backup (350gb) and took it to work where I hooked it to my desktop and used it as a backup site for my CrashPlan backup. So now I know I have one complete backup being maintained nearby while my cloud backup takes its time to fully upload.
One program to rule them all!
Dear Bryan Decker,
Thanks for this excellent insight. I have been doing something similar using an Amazon s3 account but the setup is a little tricky. I have not worked with CrashPlan.com but will check it out.
–
David Marx
Any ideas on the lifetime a a typical disc? I heard the standard is about five years.
Dear JohnP,
There are a lot of rumors and little hard science on this topic. My sense is that the average CD-R, or DVD-/+R, disk will last about five to ten years if stored properly. You might find this article on CD / DVD longevity interesting but regardless of their lifespan I am going to keep using them for my archive until a less expensive mass data storage technology comes along. It’s worth pointing out that the disks might last longer but if my computer in say 2020 still has a CD drive then I am going to be let down!
This technology, both the disks and the readers, is clearly on the decline and the future is in flash memory and online file storage. When the price gets low enough, I will use these options for my “archive” copy and give up on optical disks. Until the price of these technologies comes down to the ridiculously low price of a blank DVD though I still consider optical disks the best storage media for my unedited mass of digital images.
I urge you, and all of my reader’s, to check out this insightful advice on backups and archive systems from the American Society of Media Photographers dpBestflow project.
–
David Marx
Hi David,
a newcomer to digital photography I appreciate your tutorials.
When I tried to burn the pictures (NEF lossless compressed)of my 8 GB CF Card (SanDisk Extreme III, full)on an 8.5 GB DVD (Verbatim 8x DVD+R DL) my burning program (Windows 7)told me that 903 MB were required, but 7.96 MB were available, only.
What is your advice? Would you consider it a good idea to compress the data and burn these files? Is there any program available which does a good job compressing AND burning?
Best regards,
Gottfried, Vienna, Austria
NB Perhaps you could elaborate more on export e.g. viewing on a TV.
NBB I found an interesting lightroom tool for presets in the developing mode (no own experiences, yet): http://www.traumflieger.de/desktop/lightroom/lightroom_tools.php
Dear Gottfried,
First, the actual capacity of most DVD’s is about 7GB. So if you’re trying to archive an 8GB card you will need to use two disks. Software that features “disk spanning” makes this much easier. With disk spanning you software will automatically divide the files up. This ability is built into Lightroom on the Mac and I believe it works with 32-bit versions of the Windows Operating System. If Lightroom can’t burn disks for you then I would recommend using a full featured DVD burning program like Roxio. I am hesitant to recommend this specific product though since I am not actually using it on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine.
I do not recommend compressing your archive files regardless of the disk burning software. If the idea is to make a perfect copy that will be useable years into the future then I would be very wary of any compression routine. What happens if your computer of say 2015 no longer recognizes the compression system that you used when the disk was burned in 2011? The one exception to this is to turn your NEF files into DNG files. I am a big fan of DNG conversion though it is not for everyone. This article on the potential benefits of the dng file format for digital photographers might interest you.
I hope this helps,
David Marx
P.S. Exporting for TV is not supposed to be hard but until the world reaches some standards on television size (resolution) or video format (pal vs. ntsc) its a horribly vague topic!
[...] Archives and Backup Copies [...]
[...] Archives and Backup Copies [...]
[...] you put anything on it. See how to format an external drive and please don’t forget to back everything up. var a2a_config = a2a_config || {}; a2a_config.linkname="Recommended External Hard Drives– [...]
What a story, Chris! Thanks for sharing that and for pointing out the high (financial) cost of hard drive recovery. I had just commented on the cost of hard drive recovery on another thread.
-Scott
During a photo-vacation in Canada, my 1.0 TB external hard Drive stopped working. I bought another for the remainder of my vacation. Upon returning home, I took the failed drive to a Data Retrieval company. They got the drive to activate, and in 10-minutes an acrid, blue smoke came from the drive enclosure. To make this long story, shorter; they were able to retrieve my 36,000 images, at a cost of $2,100.00. A costly lesson. I now have two external hard drives.
Chris
I used to feel fairly secure burning to DVD, but recently, I had a series of DVDs fail that were 1 1/2 years old. I did ship them via boat from America to France, so maybe something happened? Not all were corrupted though, mostly my most current files. Thankfully I had all the files on a hard drive as well. I have a lot less confidence in DVD now. I think of it as ONE of my safety nets, which I know you are saying as well, I just share as a word of warning.
Don’t be too confident in DVD!
I shoot RAW and convert to dng on importing into Lightroom. Do you recommend saving the RAW files or the dng files to the Untouchable disk? I also apply basic metadata on import (creator, copyright, general keywords). If you recommend keeping the dng files instead of the RAW images (which could require proprietary software from Canon when you’ve switched to Nikon), would you burn the disk before or after changing the metadata. The advantage to doing it after is easier searching. Also, if you rename your files, be sure to preserve the original file name to make it easier to locate the original file.
You could be more blunt in this: if you don’t keep a copy, you WILL loose all your data at some point in time.
Most people have this false sense of security around the data stored on their HD’s
One thing that I always try to get into my friends heads:
If you just want to do 1 thing, store one copy of what you really don’t want to lose (on a DVD, 2nd external drive, whatever) at somebody else’s place.
If your house burns down, your DVD-archive stored in your basement will be worthless.
You do not have a true fall-back scenario if any one event (HD crash, fire, flood, burglary, etc) can destoy all your copies.
My structure:
1) running Timemachine on OSX for the “local HD failure”
2) regular incremental backup to external HD which normally resides at parents-in-law house 5 miles away
3) mirror of my picture folder to my brothers server 80 miles away (process running automatically at night over the internet)
But I’d be happy if everone would just perform point 2) once a year.
[...] Source and Read More: thelightroomlab.com [...]
Fans of this site know that I am keen on backups and archives for my computers and my digital images. I cannot stress enough how important it is to make multiple copies of our important files.
This morning I read an interesting blog post from Terry White, director North America Creative Pro Core Business for Adobe Systems Inc., on his recent troubles and on how his multitude of backups saved the day. Terry White’s backup system is more elaborate then mine but as you will see in his article we share the same basic philosophy: “Any device will fail sooner or later. Make multiple backups to reduce your risk of total disaster.”
For more expert advice on backup systems please click here.
Helpful remindfer after class.
[...] Source and Read More: thelightroomlab.com [...]