Adding another portable external hard drive...

[jen2481]

Every time I try to do something that involves LrC, something ALWAYS goes wrong and I lose all of my photos. (as in, I have to have Adobe remote my computer and find everything.....)

Right now, I am at the point where my current portable external hard drive is almost full. I need to switch over to a new one. HOW do I do this without completely messing everything up again??? (I need very basic instructions, step-by-step. I am horrible at doing these types of things for some reason!)

[D Fosse]

Just make sure it has the same drive letter, and that you copy everything over exactly as it is.

When using external drives, it always pays to assign a high drive letter. Then it won't be randomly changed by other temporary drives claiming the same drive letter.

[richardplondon]

It would be more accurate to call this an addressing problem than that any images are actually LOST - they just temporarily need to be looked for at a different drive letter and file path. And that apparent moving-around can be prevented. 

I think to set a fixed drive letter you need to be (temporarily) signed in as an administrator user rather than a standard user. If you just set up a user on the computer originally and are still using that, it's an administrator login. I find it more secure to use a standard user login that is created separately, so for me I would need to switch users to do the task.

Right-click on the Windows icon on startbar and choose Disk Management. With the external drive connected, you can from there assign it a new drive letter of your choice (provided that letter is not already in use). Hereafter whenever the drive is connected / the computer is turned on, instead of receiving whatever is (accidentally) the first available drive letter, it will instead actively ask for this particular drive letter you have chosen.

If you chose (say) E:, it would quite often be the case that something else would have already been auto-assigned E: (another USB storage device or a connected phone or whatever) in which case the drive would have to get (say) F: on the fly instead. This variation is what you are trying to avoid. 

But if you tell it to always ask for (say) drive letter M: (you can go all the way up to Z) - the auto-assigned letters D, E etc are never going to come into conflict with this. So this drive is pretty much guaranteed to succeed in getting M: every time. If you had another drive, you might assign N: (say) for the same reason.

Once a drive letter is fixed and persisting, and you have re-browsed within the Catalog so it knows this is where the pictures now are - the Catalog can treat that as a constant. Thus this apparent "losing" of image and image folders no longer happens.

[dj_paige]

You need to have backups of your catalog file and all of your photos before you do this.

Please follow these instructions carefully: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/move-photos-another-hard-drive-leaving-catalog/   ADVICE: take five new meaningless photos (like photos of a bottle of ketchup in your refrigerator) so if you make mistakes nothing is lost, then import them into LrC into a new folder on the old hard disk, and then move that folder to the new hard disk following the above instructions. This will confirm (or not) that you are doing it properly.