Lightroom and external drives

Question

Basically, I have a couple of related questions.

im now at a stage where I should be seriously looking at better backup.

i run LR from a desktop pc, and also want to run it occasionally on a laptop offsite.

my intention is to backup to a portable external drive ( and cloud). firstly, for the backup, should it be a mirror image of my internal drive, which is only has LR data on ( everything else is a separate SSD)?

if this is the case, then can the external drive be the default drive for LR on the laptop?

hope that makes sense.

thanks

Dave

ManiacJoe · Accepted Answer

Regardless of what form your backups take, you need to make sure that you never use them for any other purpose than an emergency restore. Otherwise you risk losing these files just like you might lose the masters.

The easiest (not prettiest) way to share your edits between multiple computers is to put the images and the catalog on an external drive and move the drive from computer to computer as needed. (This usually results in a need for two external drives: one to use and one as the backup.)

As for the actual backup, keeping it as a simple mirror of the master folder tree is the easiest way to go. This can easily be done using drag and drop from Explorer/Finder, or a recursive copy command in a shell script.

dj_paige · Answer

Agreeing with ManiacJoe, this is a poor idea.

You must make backups of your catalog file and presets and all photos to a different physical disk, and then NOT USE the backups for any purpose except an emergency where your originals are no longer available.

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