Archiving on external hard drive

[LeeMiller]

I need some help again from you veterans. I'd like to maintain all my RAW images on a large external drive, and use smart previews for any editing or access I want to do routinely. This works fine if I load the images directly there from the camera, then into Lightroom. The problem I have is when I'm traveling without the drive and want to work on my images before I get home. How do I tell Lightroom to find the sources images if I copy them to the external drive AFTER having loading them to Lightroom? Should I be doing this differently? It seems like this must be a common problem.

Thanks!

 

[clee01l]

You can have multiple volumes appear in the Folder panel. I keep older images on an EHD and the most recent imports on the local drive. If your master images are (usually) on the EHD and you have Smart Previews on the local drive, you can walk away from the EHD at any time. When traveling you can import new images to the local drive (presumably the only drive that you have with you). When you return, you can reconnect the EHD and both volumes will share as green in the folder panel. You can then drag the new folders in the Folder Panel from the local volume to the EHD volume.

 

[LeeMiller]

Thanks for the advice -- I'm finally getting around to putting it in place. It appears that dragging a folder between locations in the folder panel moves (rather than copying) the folder. I was hoping to maintain two copies, one local and one archive, until the local copy got too large, then I'd manually copy it to a second external drive. Is there any way to achieve that with lightroom? Any better solution?

Update -- 5 minutes after I posted this, I realized it was moving rather than copying, because I was testing within the same volume. As soon as I used a different drive, it copied. Now I have a new question. With two folders having the same content, is LR smart enough to keep the paths straight when I later delete the local content?

 

[clee01l]

Thanks for the advice -- I'm finally getting around to putting it in place. It appears that dragging a folder between locations in the folder panel moves (rather than copying) the folder. I was hoping to maintain two copies, one local and one archive, until the local copy got too large, then I'd manually copy it to a second external drive. Is there any way to achieve that with lightroom? Any better solution?

You only need one LR reference. That is why the folder panel Moves files and not copies them. Smart Previews (the ones that you want with you when you travel are managed by LR in the Smart Previews folder alongside your catalog. What you really want is to MOVE the master image files to the EHD (that will stay at home) and make sure that LR has created Smart Previews for all of these files. It is the smart previews that LR will access when you are away from the EHD and the original will again be available to LR when you remount the EHD You do not need two copies of the originals referenced in LR. You do need a good bullet proof backup for when your primary disk drive or your EHD fails and to need to reconstruct the contents.

 

[LeeMiller]

I realize that I NEED only one, but I thought this might be an efficient way to get a backup made. My impatience is catching up with me though -- 5 minutes after the second post, I realized that LR had in fact deleted the original folder after the OS finished copying it. This all makes sense, but I'll just need to adopt good habits of manually making an extra copy pretty much every time I import.

While we're at it, I've got another couple questions about smart previews.
1) I recently imported a set of images and for some reason, I've got a warning in the catalog window that 32 of them failed to build smart previews. I'm not sure why, as the source images are there. How do I force it to build them? Any way of confirming a given image has a smart preview?
2) The folder containing the catalog has subfolders for both previews and smart previews. Why both? It seems like a major waste of disk space.

 

[clee01l]

File copies that mirror each other are NOT a backup. You need to use a system back up app like TimeMachine or something similar to provide versioning and recovery of what I call Stupid User Mistakes. If you inadvertently delete a good file and later wish to recover it, a mirrored copy is not going to help Adobe is not a company to turn to for a backup solution. LR does not do backups. Even the so called catalog backup on exit is not a true backup. You need a system plan for disaster recovery of all of your critical user data, not just your image files. That is why there are dedicated backup apps like TimeMachine, CrashPlan and others to fill that niche.

I can't speak directly as to why SmartPreviews of 32 of your imported images were not created. It could be that you are out of room on the drive where the Smart previews are housed or that you ran out of free space on the primary drive where LR creates temporary files.

There is a menu item ( {Library}{Previews}{Build Smart Previews} ) that you can use to build Smart previews after import.

Smart previews are lossy DNG files that are compressed to be a small size representation of your original and can be used by LR as a substitute when the original is not present. The only way that I know that you can insure that Smart Previews are present is to select the images and run the "Build Smart Previews" function described above. LR will either build a new preview or report that one already exists.