[jatrax]

'm having quite a time of deciding how to handle LR imports and where to store images. Anybody found anything that works that doesn't result in another server? I've considered throwing an external (and rotating it with an off-site duplicate) HD on the NAS, and importing photos to the NAS. No good for editing away from home though, and pretty dependent on the network speed.

I think that is essentially what I do. The LR imports all go to the WHS RAID drives. The catalog has to be local as LR will not let it be on a network drive, at least the last time I looked. The catalog is backed up on close to the server so I have a daily backup as well as the live file on the local PC, as well as the one included in the daily backup of the PC itself.

Performance is quite good enough for me, but as you say it will be network dependent. I have all gigabit networking installed.

[jatrax]

In my experience, the challenge becomes the very size of the live library in the "hot" locations.

Quite true. Which may act as a counterbalance to the digital tendency to shoot everything and keep everything. I have found that I am being more discriminating in what I keep. I used to keep most everything, now I sort out what I want to keep and get rid of the rest. That seems to have slowed the growth rate at least.

[Bob from Aus]

1. Since I don't actually build PCs anymore, and run things off laptop HD's, I'm having quite a time of deciding how to handle LR imports and where to store images. Anybody found anything that works that doesn't result in another server? I've considered throwing an external (and rotating it with an off-site duplicate) HD on the NAS, and importing photos to the NAS. No good for editing away from home though, and pretty dependent on the network speed.

Two computers ago i had a limited c drive and was filling my other drives. I tried working with an external drive and it was a disaster. The computer kept calling the external drive different names so lightroom couldn't find my files. I kept dumping stuff including programs off the c drive as lighroom kept adding to its memory. I can't imagine using lightroom on a notebook

It was an expensive external drive but it didn't perform that well and eventually died. That was the point I got my nest computer but this time I didn't allow my autistic son build it.

[Miguel]

Anybody found anything that works that doesn't result in another server?

Not really. Anything connected with a consumer-level NAS such as an external USB drive will be on the slow side. LR is just not a client/server tool.

How large are your laptop internal drives? And are any SSDs? How many images in your LR library? Do you need access to all of these all the time? You could just maintain an interim library of LR images on your laptop and plan on transferring them over to a master library on the NAS at a regular time interval.

M

[ElJamoquio]

I have three drives in the computer - pictures are on a RAID (0? the backup one, not the speed one).

I have backups on ~3 external hard drives stashed in various locations. Speaking of which, I should re-back-up one now.

I also have Carbonite, which is fairly worthless.

[bossa]

My computer has six internal drives with matching externals that I back up to. I also have an external raid with two drives mirroring one another that I use for super critical stuff that I can never lose. A few years ago I lost 1,000's of photos after a 1.5TB drive I had failed, it was made up of two 750MB drives , one of which died... I kinda learned a big lesson from that although I recently got lazy but had a lucky escape. Only a couple of months ago one of my drives lost it's boot block and I had to locate a utility that would restore everything without messing with the data structure, luckily I found one after hunting the net for days and managed to rescue my data. The next day I went out and bought 4x 3TB hard drives to organize my entire back-up system again as I'd outgrown my current drives. It took about 8 days to reorganize my drives and match the internal drives with external drives of the same size but I feel much safer now.

I use Directory Opus to back up my files as (I've used it from my Amiga days) it has UPDATE commands that allow effective copying of files that do not exist or which have changed to the destination drives.. you can also choose to rename the new files and keep the old ones. After the BS I went through with Norton 360 not being able to read it's own back-up files I'll never use that method again.

[kh1234567890]

My photos (some 450 gig of jpegs, raws and videos) live on one HD drive which is daily synched with its copy on a physically separate drive using Allway Sync. This propagates any changes, edits etc. Daily synch as opposed to real time synch gives me a chance to catch any mistaken deletes etc.

Both drives are continuously monitored using HDSentinel which is pretty good at giving enough warning of any imminent problems to get a replacement drive. Drives are cheap and seem to last at least 5 years in my setup - good power supply, good air flow to keep the drive temperatures low, powered up 24/7 etc.

Periodically this HD is also synched with a spare drive which normally lives unpowered offsite. All my photos are also on Flickr - as jpegs only, but it is better than nothing, should all else fail. I have looked into RAID and cloud storage but I'm not convinced that those are the best solutions for what I need. In my experience, backing up to optical storage (CD, DVD etc) is a waste of time.

[magkelly]

I back up on a HD and on DVD's as I go. Make three sets. Two sets I keep here. Third set goes into our safety deposit box. I have a backup USB HD that has all my photos on it, but the DVD's are my insurance. I don't like and never will use cloud storage if I can help it. I just don't want all my photos online, even in a supposedly secure online space, where anyone could potentially access them. I'd rather take a DVD burner along and burn my DVD's, send a set home as I leave wherever, and carry a set home in my one bag. Yes, it's a fair amount of DVD's, but even as RAW files/TIFF's I can fit a lot of files onto one DVD and I do edit out the crappy ones to save space. So I have a few hundred DVD's in my safety deposit box and in a cabinet in my home. That's fine. So long as at least one set is off site I'm covered.

[reeftool]

Lucky for me I am 62. I am worried about 30 year old photographers and how they will keep their material for the next 40 years.

Well, I've lost plenty of prints and negatives/slides through the years to mildew and fading so all was not perfect. I backup to external hard drives and DVD,s and have most of my keepers online as well.

[Clarkey]

I think that is essentially what I do. The LR imports all go to the WHS RAID drives. The catalog has to be local as LR will not let it be on a network drive, at least the last time I looked. The catalog is backed up on close to the server so I have a daily backup as well as the live file on the local PC, as well as the one included in the daily backup of the PC itself.

Performance is quite good enough for me, but as you say it will be network dependent. I have all gigabit networking installed.

Good to know for the catalog. I maintain the catalog backup on the NAS, but the main cat is local. I am using gigabit, but if someone else is using the NAS (which is an old 2-bay D-Link DNS-323) for streaming, things do slow down quite a bit. That may be what I need to look at next.

Quite true. Which may act as a counterbalance to the digital tendency to shoot everything and keep everything. I have found that I am being more discriminating in what I keep. I used to keep most everything, now I sort out what I want to keep and get rid of the rest. That seems to have slowed the growth rate at least.

+1 on this, been a lot more discriminating in the last year or so. It is hard with high res. cameras and documenting how one's family is growing.

[Clarkey]

Two computers ago i had a limited c drive and was filling my other drives. I tried working with an external drive and it was a disaster. The computer kept calling the external drive different names so lightroom couldn't find my files. I kept dumping stuff including programs off the c drive as lighroom kept adding to its memory. I can't imagine using lightroom on a notebook

It was an expensive external drive but it didn't perform that well and eventually died. That was the point I got my nest computer but this time I didn't allow my autistic son build it.

I have perceptions of exactly the situation you describe with an external backup drive, not to mention the appalling performance drop with proprietary backup software like WD Smartware. I think I want the external drive solution to be the backup of what is on the network only.

Not really. Anything connected with a consumer-level NAS such as an external USB drive will be on the slow side. LR is just not a client/server tool.

How large are your laptop internal drives? And are any SSDs? How many images in your LR library? Do you need access to all of these all the time? You could just maintain an interim library of LR images on your laptop and plan on transferring them over to a master library on the NAS at a regular time interval.

M

I am in the process of migrating between laptops. Both are single HDD platters.
My existing one has a 750gb 7200 barracuda in it, and is decent. Unfortunately I partitioned it, and it is full, so whatever I do is going to play merry havoc with the catalog. It's also pretty full (I have about 450-500gb picture/video data all up - about 27K images).

My new laptop (a Lenovo U410, ivy bridge and better than the reviews would have you believe) also has a 750gb drive, but it is a 5400 and noticeably slower. I've considered an SSD for it, but the pricing isn't quite there for the drive size I would like.

However, I suspect you are right - that I should use the NAS (striped) and a master library there, and a working one on the laptop. Maybe I need a 4-bay NAS before I start that has decent speed - any suggestions for a good one?

[Miguel]

My new laptop (a Lenovo U410, ivy bridge and better than the reviews would have you believe) also has a 750gb drive, but it is a 5400 and noticeably slower. I've considered an SSD for it, but the pricing isn't quite there for the drive size I would like.

However, I suspect you are right - that I should use the NAS (striped) and a master library there, and a working one on the laptop. Maybe I need a 4-bay NAS before I start that has decent speed - any suggestions for a good one?

I'm in the process of upgrading all the laptop hard drives in our home from 5400 to 7200rpm models. The performance improvement is noticeable. Even adding a 120G SSD to your laptop (if it has space) and putting your system files and LR catalog and previews database will make a difference. SSDs have come down a lot. I just saw a 500GB for under $300 USD.

I find external drives to be a hassle to deal with (and I have 10TB of 'em spread across 5 drives), so the larger the internal drive the better. Though my dedicated photo workstation is a monster Hackintosh with 7 drives, I refresh the LR catalog with catalogs imported from my laptop after field assignments, much like I suggested. An alternative is to subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud, rent the LR app, and pay for their storage (20 Gb is comes with the deal), and live on the cloud. The business case is not very strong at this point for a consumer, but I suppose we will all end up there.

Re NAS, consumer ones are OK but they are designed for storage and not performance For work I am fortunate at having access to ultra fast commercial top shelf NAS drives that blaze--but that is due to the processing power, lotsa RAM, and a kickass OS.

I just installed a Synology NAS at home that is very easy to configure, but it is ARM-based, with 256MB of RAM, so still consumer. I only use it for backup and hosting 70 hours of home movies that were converted from 8mm videotape to MP4. It does fine for that.

You could convert an old computer or a laptop to a NAS, but then you would engender noise and power usage issues which may or may not matter to you.

Wish there were easy and cheap answers.

M

[jatrax]

I am using gigabit, but if someone else is using the NAS (which is an old 2-bay D-Link DNS-323) for streaming, things do slow down quite a bit. That may be what I need to look at next.

Had that NAS at one point (I guess I still do since it is on the shelf) but it really is slow as molasses. I was fortunate to come across a used server box, elderly but still functional, that only needed the drives added. I built a NAS using FreeNAS - The Most Potent & Rock Solid Open-Source NAS Software - Home which worked well enough for over a year. But I noticed that backups were not always working and to be honest I'm not all that techy. I think they have improved things a lot since then though. I then came across Windows Home Server 2011 on sale and decided to make a change to something more user friendly. Big speed improvement and it is rock solid as a server. And it does bare metal backups of all PCs on the network. Which work and allowed me to bring one of our PCs to full recovery in about a hour from replacing a failed HD. MS has discontinued it, which makes sense since it was a good enough product that I can recommend it.

If you have the space and don't mind another computer running all the time take a look at building your own rather than buying a NAS, I think you get better performance and definitely a lower cost.

[Clarkey]

Had that NAS at one point (I guess I still do since it is on the shelf) but it really is slow as molasses. I was fortunate to come across a used server box, elderly but still functional, that only needed the drives added. I built a NAS using FreeNAS - The Most Potent & Rock Solid Open-Source NAS Software - Home which worked well enough for over a year. But I noticed that backups were not always working and to be honest I'm not all that techy. I think they have improved things a lot since then though. I then came across Windows Home Server 2011 on sale and decided to make a change to something more user friendly. Big speed improvement and it is rock solid as a server. And it does bare metal backups of all PCs on the network. Which work and allowed me to bring one of our PCs to full recovery in about a hour from replacing a failed HD. MS has discontinued it, which makes sense since it was a good enough product that I can recommend it.

If you have the space and don't mind another computer running all the time take a look at building your own rather than buying a NAS, I think you get better performance and definitely a lower cost.

Definitely par for the course for MS products. Yes, I think I'll have to look into building something again. Windows backup also works well - provided you've bought a high end version of windows to begin with.
I've also had IRQ issues with the DNS-323 which uses a non-NTFS system (some of the Free NAS code actually), another reason to build something an be done with it.

Thanks all for the responses, and sorry to the OP for hijacking his thread!

[Kerrowdown]

5 hard drives in 1 computer

I know there's lots of clever comments and procedures going on in this thread, it's just this one line above, gives me a feeling of uneasiness, eggs and baskets.

Me, I try my best, Time Machine running all the time on the iMac (time machine keeps, hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, weekly backups for all previous months and the oldest back ups are deleted when the disk becomes full, which has currently 3TB available) 3 external drives, 1 of which kept off site.

I also use an "Ingestion" backup work flow, i.e. always copy the images to your backup first and then copy from this to the primary location, By doing this, a single visual check of the images on the primary version will validate both the primary and the backup. For more security you could then copy images from primary to a second backup. This may sound a bit heavy handed, but I would suggest it as best practice method.

Also I got a UPS, for my iMac and external drive, I bought an iDowell iBox UPS 550 VA, it just keeps it all safe and sound and works straight out of the box, the iMac even recognises it's there.

Plus the really old fashioned back up, of actual prints hanging on the wall.