Backup Protocol for Desktop version of Lightroom

[jarvis393]

I am about to rebuild my company website.

As part of this campaign I am doing an exhaustive purge & tune up of all my old images.

I am trying to figure out the most elegant way to do this.

Some of this work will happen at my house and some of it will happen at my shop.

I prefer to work with desktop applications rather than cloud based.

While my internet connection is very solid at home it is very slow at my shop.

(It is also my understanding that the desktop based version of Lightroom CC are functionally more robust than cloud based versions.)

I also plan to integrate several layers of backup redundancy.

My lightroom catalog and underlying images will be stored on several hard drives in a few locations.

MY QUESTION is where to park the actual lightroom catalog so that it can be worked on in two locations.

Should this be on a remote hard drive that I can carry back and forth to my shop or should this live in a downloadable format on something like dropbox?

If it lives on transportable hard drive will there be any address issues when I open it up using Adobe Lightroom CC?

PS:  I am not sure what they even call this anymore.  Adobe has named and renamed this product so many times I have no idea what version to ask about.

[DdeGannes]

Please clarify and be very specific. Which version of Lightroom are you referring to?

Lightroom (latest version is 2.3)

Lightroom Classic (latest version is 8.3.1)

Both of them are computer based applications.

See the screen capture.

[jarvis393]

I am using  Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 8.3.1 Release    Camera Raw 11.3

[Jao vdL]

First thing is that you are on the right avenue if you want robustness of backups. Lightroom (the cloud version) is not a backup solution at all. people treat it as such but that is extremely dangerous. If you delete an image in one location it will get deleted everywhere, even in the local storage. There is no undo and officially Adobe has no way to retrieve the images for you. So even if you use Lightroom (the cloud version) you still have to figure out an actual backup solution. This is not easy to engineer. It is not hard at all using Lightroom Classic.

Regarding your secondary question:

MY QUESTION is where to park the actual lightroom catalog so that it can be worked on in two locations.

Should this be on a remote hard drive that I can carry back and forth to my shop or should this live in a downloadable format on something like dropbox?

The fastest, most reliable way is to store the catalog on an external. Best idea is to buy a nice portable 1 GB SSD and put it there. Fast and reliable. If you do dropbox you have to be extremely careful to close Lightroom Classic on one side and let it sync over dropbox before you even touch it on the other side. Otherwise your catalog will become corrupted. So external hard disk is the best solution.

[jarvis393]

Please forgive my obtuseness.  This is all still very new to me.

As I see it there are three components to this.

The first one is the RAW files that my camera captured.  There are a lot of those and there will be more.  I need to keep these backed up and Light room needs to be able to find them.

The second part is the Lightroom catalog.  This needs to have a consistent  address relationship with the RAW files so that lightroom can find them.

The third part is the overall backup strategy.  I need to consistently (and redundantly) back up the original RAW files as well as the LightRoom Library Catalog.   There will also be the Jpeg output that I end up porting over to my website.

And then there is also the website software to continually develop and maintain.

I will be doing this on two different iMac computers in two different locations.  Both of these locations will also need to have some connection with Adobe Lightroom  (at least on an intermittent basis).

Then there is the redundant backup part.  The final output jpegs can be parked onto dropbox for convenience but the RAW Photography files, Lightroom Catalog and Website software need to be be backed up periodically onto at least a couple of hard drives and then stored in at least a couple of locations  (I am thinking five total because they are so important to me)

The hard drives will need to have different names so this will confuse Lightroom.  Do I do all my work on a portable SSD and carry that from home to office.  Will Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic be able to recognize this SSD consistently even though it is accessed from two different computers?