Am I missing something here? Seems like you would be SOL, not only for the tight ad schedule of your NY client, but also for all the photos of the swimsuit models you shot today in Aruba.

Sorry to hear you had trouble. I assure you that “it” works. Perhaps you could be more specific with your issues and we could help out.

-Scott

just tried this with LR 3 and completely didn’t work!

You’ll get decent performance with the FireWire 400 connection (the small one on your laptop). An eSATA drive would require an eSATA connection…something that is not built into most laptops yet.

-Scott

Thank you for the reply. I read your other comment and that helped explain things. I’ll have to look for an eSATA drive. I do have a FireWire port, but it is one of the small ones.

Since your internal drive is partitioned, it is stilly, functionally, a single drive. If that drive fails, all data will be lost (on both partitions). When reading from or writing to one partition, read/write speeds to the other partition will be invariably affected.

I’ve not found a good reason to partition drives, though I’m certain there are many who are smarter than I who do have good reason to do so.

Take a moment to read this comment I left on the article Recommended External Hard Drives. In that comment, I acknowledge that there are some speed gains to be had by using internal drives and “hacking” drive setups to get faster read/write speeds. My conclusion, however, is that few photographers will notice the difference.

My final advice is to use external drives to store your photos (particularly on a laptop which typically only has room for one physical internal drive). Those external drives should be fast (7200 RPM) and connected via a fast connection (FireWire 800 for those using Mac, FireWire 400 for those on Windows…eSATA if you have the capability).

Best of luck,
Scott

I’m just returning to photography as a hobby and have never used Lightroom before. I am really glad I found this site. The information has been very educational!

I’m curious about using an external drive as your primary photo drive. Wouldn’t an internal drive always be faster than an external? My laptop (Windows 7) has the internal drive partitioned, one for the OS and the other I store my music files on. I was going to store my photos on this drive. I have two external drives, both USB 2.0. It just seems that read/write time would be faster on the internal and best to use the external drives as backup along with a copy to optical disk.

Your thoughts appreciated.

Two methods:
1. See our article and video tutorial on Moving Folders from within Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. This method is a little cumbersome and tedious but not very difficult.
2. If all of your photos and folders full of images live inside a single top-level parent folder you could add this folder to Lightroom using the right click “Add Parent Folder” button in the Folders Panel. Once added you could quit Lightroom move this folder over to the other drive and then remove it from your internal hard drive. When you restart Lightroom it will tell you that all your files are missing but all you need to do is right-click again on the parent folder’s name in the Folder Panel and reconnect it using the Locate Missing Folder button.

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David

This is an excellent question and there is no absolute answer. If I am traveling say by car where space is not and issue, and if I need access to all my files, then I will pack my primary drive in a Pelican Case and take it along. The backup system never leaves the house though. It is too bulky and too risky to have both drives with me.

Since the backup drive is staying home I think its doubly important to burn a copy of each memory card to a CD / DVD. In my routine, I copy the new files into Lightroom then add the most basic metadata– where I shot the pictures and who specifically was photographed. After just a few minutes of data entry I burn all the new files to a disk using Lightroom’s integrated CD / DVD burning software. See Archives and Backup Copies for more details.

If, on the other hand, I need to travel lighter then I take the laptop, some DVDs, and a LaCie Rugged Hard Disk pocket sized external hard drive. When I am traveling light I don’t worry about bringing all of my old work along so I create a new (temporary) catalog on the computer and back it up to the LaCie.

When I get home I import this temporary catalog and all of the new photos into the main photo storage drive and then wipe it off the laptop. Martin Evening has a good tutorial on this technique here.

I hope this helps,

David

A big thanks for all these articles. They are fantastic. This might be a silly question, but Ill ask anyhow. I understand you two hard-drives. One is your working drive and the other is a back-up of it. When youre on the road. Do you take both of these drives with you? I have two new Western Digital 1TB drives looking to follow your system. But they are both big and bulky and each require a powered wall connection.

So do you take both drives with you? How do you provide redundancy if you had both drives in your hotel for example and they were stolen, or some other type of disaster.

Just curious is all.

Scott

See this site for info http://www.pchell.com/support/synctoy.shtml

Thsi site to download http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

David

Performance depends upon the drive’s rotational speed and its connector. With a fast rotational speed (7200 rpm) and a fast connector (eSATA or Firewire 800), an external hard drive can perform as well or better than an internal drive. If you are looking for a top performer consider using a RAID disk like this one: LaCie 301350U 1TB 2big Quadra 2-Disk RAID Hard Drive.

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David

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Do you find that this technique has a significant impact on performance?

Best,
Djuna

Your first question is easier to answer then the second one. After copying your photo folder from one external hard drive to another do the following:
1. Quit (Exit) Lightroom.
2. Safely eject the old external hard drive.
3. Restart Lightroom.
4. In the Folders panel right-click on your top level folder (I believe yours is called “my lightroom folders”) and then click on the “Locate Missing Folder” button. Guide the dialog over to this folder on the new drive and then you are all done. Easy!

I am afraid to give you advice though on deleting the duplicate “my lightroom photos” sub-folder. Without seeing your screen I am afraid that I might do you great harm if some of these files differ from the other copy or if they are in lots of collections. Before you delete them I want to be sure that they are not the most up-to-date version, or the version with the best metadata, or tied into lots of collections. Check all these things and if they are truly useless then delete them. (Personally, I would be sure to back up the whole drive first and my Lightroom Catalog too before this kind of massive change.)

Best of luck,

David

You are right that Lightroom edits are nondestructive regardless of your file format. Lightroom edits are stored in the file’s metadata block versus Photoshop type edits that are stored at the pixel level. This is a dorky way of saying “you have nothing to worry about no matter what file format you use in Lightroom.” Now that said, raw files are the most flexible are usually the most advantageous format for your initial capture.

You are right too that you can sort your files by file format. This is easily done either using the “file format” sort order option on the tool bar or through the metadata filter drop down.

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David

I see in your reply to Marg Wood that you recommend keeping all versions and formats of a file together, rather than in separate folders or drives. I have been I am working with TIFF files, not RAW, and exporting jpg for web or print as needed. Since LR edits are nondestructive, is it correct that even my JPG files will remain unchanged by LR? I like the idea of keeping all file formats together, stacked even, as it will make things simpler all ’round. I assume I could always search to find TIFF or JPG only and export the photos as a collection if needed.

I appreciate your updating the info about Acronis True Image as well. It seems like a good backup option.

Thanks again for your helpful replies, tutorials, and articles.

I think that you are confused about where metadata goes and the roll of the Lightroom catalog. Both are common confusions and the topics that take the most time to explain in my workshops. Assuming that you turn on the one critical preference switch in Lightroom (see the mega-important automatically write changes into xmp switch) then your metadata– the tags / keywords, captions, etc.– are all written into your files as you type them. The catalog merely reflects the information that the files actually contain.

So if you move your catalog and your images over to an external hard drive then you are free to use your catalog and images on any computer– laptop / desktop, mac / pc–as long as that computer has the Lightroom application installed and your hard drive is plugged in. Once your catalog is on the external disk you can delete the one that was original created on your computer’s internal hard drive. Since there is now only one catalog– the one on the external disk– there is no need to sync anything. All work that you do will happen within this catalog. The backup disk is just a mirror image of this entire drive. We never do anything to the files on the backup disk. Good software like Acronis True Image will take care of all the files on this disk.

By going with a single catalog on a single external hard drive you are not tied to any specific computer and you will never need to use the sync command! I hope this helps but again this is the trickiest part to Lightroom. For more advice see:

George Jardine’s Video on the roll of the Lightroom Catalog.

Martin Evening’s article on Importing and Exporting Catalogs.

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David