Finally ready to work off external drives.. Now I just need some more guidance!

[Tom_brown3]

I jsut picked up 2 2Tb external drives. My workflow goal is simple. Store all photos/catlaogs etc on the 2 drives. one is a "working" drive, the other a backup. I want to do a shoot, dump from the card onto computer into lightroom, then reject or edit accordingly. Once Im done, I want to put the raws and pics with edits onto an external drive, than back that drive up to a second for redundancy. 

I need some guidance on the first step. Transferrnig all my lightroom stuff to the drive from my computer SSD. I also would like to know if I need some sort of cloning program so the backup drive stays updated. Any help is GREATLY appreciated!!!

[Rob_Cullen]

Transferrnig all my lightroom stuff to the drive from my computer SSD.

Good advice here-

MOVING PHOTOS- 2 Methods

See Option #2 in the article for using the OS to COPY the files.  This method has been shown to be more reliable for LARGE folder/file moves. (delete from the SSD later after success in updating folder location to the new external drive.)

Many "Cloning" programs out there to Backup. (I use SyncBackFree)

I want to do a shoot, dump from the card onto computer into lightroom, then reject or edit accordingly. Once Im done, I want to put the raws and pics with edits onto an external drive,...I need some guidance...

(After you 'Move' to the new external drives) Import ("dump") directly to the External Drive where the files will be stored. You will never need to move them again and risk corruption.

[Tom_brown3]

So I panicked and may have done something wrong. Thank god I did a time machine backup before. After the time machine I went to lightroom. hit prerfrences, found the locations of lightroom stuff. I copied all the folders, moved them to both of my new drives. I then deleted it all from my internal drive. With the ectrnal drives plugged in, I opened lightroom and it starting asking questions on where the catalogs were. I clicked the drive, and it would not let me select everything. Then I got more confused, and freaked out. I ejected the drives. and pulled the deleted stuff from the time machine, with (for some reason) the added bonus of 1000+ photos Ive deleted in the last few months? My guess, the creative cloud. What did I do wrong?

[dj_paige]

I want to do a shoot, dump from the card onto computer into lightroom, then reject or edit accordingly. Once Im done, I want to put the raws and pics with edits onto an external drive, than back that drive up to a second for redundancy.

Make your life simpler. When the photos come out of the camera and are imported into Lightroom Classic, put them on the external disk directly. Don't bother putting them on the internal disk and moving them later, its an extra step, extra manual work, and there is no real benefit to having photos on the internal drive. Extra work for no benefit, I don't like the sound of that. In my opinion, the best workflow involves moving photos as few times as possible.

[Tom_brown3]

my only concern with doing it that way was after I edit in Lightroom I often use a secondary program such as Topaz sharpener or Denoise. I'm not sure how doing that on a hard drive would effect the performance of those programs. 

[dj_paige]

I can't speak about Topaz or other software, but in Lightroom Classic there is only a trivial difference in speed, so small you will never notice, between photos on an internal drive and photos on an external drive.

The easy way to find out if this is the case with Topaz is to try your workflow with Topaz using photos on the internal drive, and then try Topaz using photos on an external drive.

[Tom_brown3]

So I panicked and may have done something wrong. Thank god I did a time machine backup before. After the time machine I went to lightroom. hit prerfrences, found the locations of lightroom stuff. I copied all the folders, moved them to both of my new drives. I then deleted it all from my internal drive. With the ectrnal drives plugged in, I opened lightroom and it starting asking questions on where the catalogs were. I clicked the drive, and it would not let me select everything. Then I got more confused, and freaked out. I ejected the drives. and pulled the deleted stuff from the time machine, with (for some reason) the added bonus of 1000+ photos Ive deleted in the last few months? My guess, the creative cloud. What did I do wrong?

[dj_paige]

So I panicked and may have done something wrong. Thank god I did a time machine backup before. After the time machine I went to lightroom. hit prerfrences, found the locations of lightroom stuff. I copied all the folders, moved them to both of my new drives. I then deleted it all from my internal drive. With the ectrnal drives plugged in, I opened lightroom and it starting asking questions on where the catalogs were. I clicked the drive, and it would not let me select everything. Then I got more confused, and freaked out. I ejected the drives. and pulled the deleted stuff from the time machine, with (for some reason) the added bonus of 1000+ photos Ive deleted in the last few months? My guess, the creative cloud. What did I do wrong?

By @Tom_brown3

Sounds like you deleted your catalog file. I hope you have a recent backup, or can find it in the trash. File name ends with .LRCAT.

[Tom_brown3]

I made sure to copy that as well. Im not sure what happened. So after I delete everything from my computers SSD, Restart lightroom, I should seek out the Lrcat file and open that one on the new drive?

[dj_paige]

Yes.

In the future, don't delete anything until you are sure the files on the new drive have been properly connected and Lightroom Classic is working properly.

[Tom_brown3]

I just re deleted from harddrive, plugged in the one I had backed photos up to. I can see everything but its having trouble locating them

[dj_paige]

I just re deleted from harddrive, plugged in the one I had backed photos up to. I can see everything but its having trouble locating them

By @Tom_brown3

Be specific here. What is having trouble locating what? Details. Screen captures. etc.

[Tom_brown3]

I figured it out. I just had to locate the Parent folder on the external drive. Everything is all good and synced up! Now I just need to figure out how to backup the external drive I work off of to the backup external drive.

[dj_paige]

I figured it out. I just had to locate the Parent folder on the external drive. Everything is all good and synced up! Now I just need to figure out how to backup the external drive I work off of to the backup external drive.

By @Tom_brown3

Get third party backup software, that will make regular and automated backups of your photos and your catalog file. (Or perhaps Time Machine does this, I am not a Mac user so I don't know).

The backups must be automated. Backups that are performed by humans are not acceptable because humans (meaning you) will fail at times, either because your are too busy, or don't remember, or have other priorities. I have seen far too many people in this forum lament that they have had a hard disk crash and they haven't made a backup in months.

[Tom_brown3]

Uggg. I thought I had everything working right and I was mistaken. 

Basically Lightroom cant find any of my photos from when I was using my old mackbook air. 

When I moved everything over to the new harddrive I had 2000+ photos. Now through me trying to fix the issue I have 4000 images and everything is messed up. Its telling me to look for the missing photos in users/tombrown/pictures/lightroom/mobiledownloads.lrdata/Macbook Air/ filename

I have a mobiledownloads.LRdata on my external drive, but I can't select it because its grayed out.

Basically everything from February on is fine and where its supposed to be, anything before that it cant find. I got my new computer mid January and my new camera body early february.

[Conrad C]

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@Tom_brown3 wrote:

I also would like to know if I need some sort of cloning program so the backup drive stays updated. Any help is GREATLY appreciated!!!

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The others did great answering the moving question. With the cloning program, on the Mac some reliable, respected choices are Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper!, and Chronosync. The first two are generally better for what I call “blind” incremental backups, where you just run a backup job, it compare and figures out the file changes, you come back in a few minutes and it’s done. I think this makes them better for whole volume backups involving system files, including bootable backups.

I’m currently using Chronosync to keep my photo archive backups up to date, and the reason is unlike the other two, Chronosync has a Trial Sync feature where you run a job as a simulation, then it shows you a list of all the files it’s going to add, replace, and delete and I can then approve it to go on and do it for real. I like to take a quick look at that simulation in case it’s going to do something unexpected or time-consuming. For example, one time I changed the name of a folder, and the Trial Sync told me I was going to have to wait like 40 minutes for the backup because now there was no matching named folder on the backup, and that folder contained many GB of subfolders to copy. I realized I could just rename the same folder on the backup to match and then run the job; that time it noticed no changes to that folder and subfolders, and the rest of the incremental backup was just a couple minutes.

So if you just want a quick set-and-forget, pick any of them, but if you want more control consider Chronosync. Also, all three will let you schedule your backups.

[Austin5D4A]

if both ssd's will be connected at the same time, raid level 1 provides automatic mirroring and is easily configured using disk utility (if on mac) and probably very easily using disk manager on windows. this means other than initial configuration, you don't have to mess with manually running file syncing.

if you are keeping the drives separated and will only be bringing them together whenever you want to backup drive 1 to drive 2, rsync will be your very best friend. if you are interested in this option i can offer more specific guidance.

[Austin5D4A]

btw, both of the options i mentioned are built into macos and probably windows--cost nothing except learning how to use them--which is easy to do.