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

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

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

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

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!

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

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!