Moving from Lightroom to Lightroom Classic - hard drive / back up questions

[natalieh97041142]

It's lockdown so I have plenty of time to set up all my albums / catalog's on Lightroom Classic.

I've never used it before as the lure of editing off my ipad, seeing the edited photos on my mac desktop and it all saving to the Adobe cloud storage has been too easy. (But I've always saved the raw files to my 4tb hard drive), In Lightroom, every Monday after working on the weekend and sending photos to clients, I've had to regularly purge the albums due to reaching capacity so for this reason, and the editing functionality available on Classic, it's time for me to stop using it. 

Q1: With no cloud storage for Lightroom Classic, can I use multiple hard drives (was thinking 2 x 4TB for 2021, and again 2022 etc) for different kinds of (sports) photos for saving raw files and edited files? Or do I need to buy one large hard drive eg 10TB so the 'tags' work across all my data?

Q2: Then there is back up, do I then need to buy another large hard drive e.g 10TB for back up

Q3: How often do you set the back up to run?

So far I have close to 4tb of raw / edited photos over the last 12 months. I want to set up my back end to not have to worry about it as I ramp up my work when lockdown finally finishes ! 

[Jim Wilde]

1. Yes, the LrC catalog can access images from multiple hard drives.

2. Well, you need to have backup drives that can handle your image library (and other non-Lightroom data) with room for expansion.

3. A combination of daily and weekly works for me, it all depends on your attitude to risk. Obviously you should have a backup strategy that deals with all your critical data, not just image files, and using an incremental backup utility allows you to automatically backup only new or changed files.

Although the LrC subscription plan only has 20GB of cloud space, you can still sync your entire image library from LrC to the cloud. LrC only uploads 2560px smart previews to the cloud, which are usually good enough for online sharing, mobile viewing and even some mobile editing, and the SPs do not count against that 20GB cloud space.