Publish to Hard Drive as Backup

The issue of needing the HD space to at least upload a mirrored version to Google Drive or Pcloud was what I was trying to get around.  Any time I try to backup an external HD or copy to the cloud it either times out or I run out of space. 

I'll investigate the many options for backup/sync you've all suggested. 

Thanks so much for the help everyone. 

You have recevied some excellent answers and solutions in the responses.

People normally back up using the  3-2-1 rule : duplication on 3 separate drives, stored in two separate locations for every important file.

The cloud storage also becomes expensive when you are talking about storing image files.

External drives are relatively inexpensive these days, and there  is excellent and affordable software for cloning and incremental back ups.

I personally have used both CarbonCopyCloner from Bombich software and Personal Back UP from Intego, and never had an issue regarding cloning or syncing.

And like the others said, maintain duplicates of not only the original photo files, but also the complete Lightroom Catalog file and its associated files, basically back up the entire Lightroom folder as well as the original photo files.

On the surface your idea looks like it could work. There are objections in this thread based on the correct idea that you should back up originals and not edited exports, but Publish Service can do that: Just as in the Export dialog, the Format menu in Publish Services does offer an Original option, which means literally the original file, as imported, with no edits. As long as you also back up the Lightroom Classic catalog so that you have the edits, you could in theory use the Hard Drive Publish Service to maintain a second copy of all originals.

However, it looks like there is another potentially fatal flaw that is the real reason the Publish Service probably won’t help you: The Publish Service does not preserve the original folder hierarchy. I tested adding images from different folders to the Publish Service, and just as I suspected, it dumps them all in the single destination folder that you set up for it. This would make it impractical to restore from the Publish Service backup, because all images would be in one incredibly large folder, and you would have to reconstruct and name every subfolder in the tree by hand before letting Lightroom Classic relink to them.

Another idea would be to export originals using a Lightroom Classic plug-in that preserves the original folder hierarchy. I think there is one, although I can’t remember the name. But that would require regular manual exporting, so you probably don’t want to pursue that avenue either.

Hopefully you understand that the Hard Drive Publish Service can export only to a locally mounted volume. In other words, the cloud drive folder you are thinking of must exist locally, like the Dropbox folder, because the Hard Drive Publish Service will not be able to connect to any file servers that don’t appear on the desktop. What that means is if you have 3TB of photos, you’d better have another 3TB free locally for the backup copies that aren’t uploaded yet, sitting in the local cloud sync folder.

In the end, what the rest of us in this thread do probably turns out to be the easiest, fastest way: Use a good local backup sync utility to copy the originals, preserving their complete current folder hierarchy, to another local backup location. This still works if you want to back up to a local folder synced to a cloud service, because using a robust sync utility to back up your original folder hierarchy will preserve that folder hierarchy, and can be fully automatic (no need to remember to hit Publish). It could be set up to run itself on a regular schedule. A good sync utility is really the better way to go, compared to trying to do it from inside Lightroom Classic itself.

You should be doing a full backup of all your media files (picture, video, music) and documents, etc. Lot's of free file synchronization apps available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_synchronization_software

In addition to your pictures and LrC catalog file(s) there are other files you should be backing up.

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/backup-lightroom-files/

Does it make sense to Publish-To-Hard-Drive all of my photos to a cloud drive as an image backup? 

By @jpilote

NO!

It won't work. To make backups of your photo for the purposes of Lightroom Classic, you must make backups of your original photos, not exported photos. You also need a backup of the Lightroom Classic Catalog. Then you have everything you need in case your originals get destroyed.