[madison_wi_gal]

I suspect this will cause some (hopefully mild) heated discussion, but I have several hard drives and a lot of SD cards and I want to consolidate ~everything to one spot and use Lightroom Classic to manage and tag and whatnot. I have newest LRC and can keep up on the subscription.

The LRC catalog will be on the laptop hard drive and backed up.

The images will be on some (as yet undetermined size) SSD based external drive.

And yes, I am IT, so I know I need to back up the external drive as well.

What works for you?

I am a hobbyist and do this for fun, so a catastrophic drive failure will suck but I will still be able to feed my family so we need not go nuts on the cost of this setup.

Thanks!!

[pepperberry farm]

I upload to flickr, with a Pro account (unlimited storage), plus an external HD, plus occasional (not often enough) burns to DVD, and DVD's stored in a separate location...

in the event of an emergency (here that includes tornado), external drives are swiped off the desk, along with a go-bag and down the stairs to the basement....

[brianmquinn]

One thing to consider is what if you suddenly cease to be around. If the photos are only for you OK. But if there are photos that mean something to your family you should have a way to keep them alive for them. You might have a massive online file, but if they don't have the password, what then? If you fail to pay your yearly fee to keep the account active (since you are dead) will the account, be closed and all the photos lost? If you have DVDs, backup hard drives you may need to have a PAPER instructions in the box with them so someone does not toss the DVDs and format the drives as they are just clutter in the estate.

Trust me I have been so upset when I heard that my relatives threw out 100 years of negatives, "They were just clutter, nobody every ever looks at them".

[Digitalis]

By storing them on a NAS and Categorize image folders by Camera>Year>Subject>Date

[madison_wi_gal]

One thing to consider is what if you suddenly cease to be around. If the photos are only for you OK. But if there are photos that mean something to your family you should have a way to keep them alive for them. You might have a massive online file, but if they don't have the password, what then? If you fail to pay your yearly fee to keep the account active (since you are dead) will the account, be closed and all the photos lost? If you have DVDs, backup hard drives you may need to have a PAPER instructions in the box with them so someone does not toss the DVDs and format the drives as they are just clutter in the estate.

Good point, I'll sort that once I get these organized.

---------- Post added 08-08-22 at 19:49 ----------

By storing them on a NAS and Categorize image folders by Camera>Year>Subject>Date

NAS or gigantic external that gets put away when not in use.

I already do categorize by camera.

[Kiwizinho]

The nice thing about Lightroom catalogs is they keep track of the images whether the device with the images on is available is not, so it's easy to search your catalog and if the device currently isn't accessible for the photos you want, simply plug it in.
I have my photos distributed between my laptop hard drive and a desktop PC that are connected via LAN. The desktop PC has greater storage than the laptop, but I use the laptop more often, so the desktop PC isn't always on, however I don't need access to all the original images all the time, but it is important to be able to find where they are from one location.
The LRC catalog works well for this, as I've been pretty thorough with keywording, and I have my folder structure organised by date.
Syncing catalogs between devices is a bit of a pain, especially if drive letters aren't the same, but thankfully Pentax shoots DNG natively, and it's possible to save the edit metadata back to DNG files.
I have both laptop and desktop backed up to external hard drives using backup software that backs up the entire system and provides for creating bootable rescue media, so even a complete drive failure would be simple to recover from.
I use the same backup software to periodically clone drives if I find myself running out of space and need to upgrade to something with higher capacity.
A motherboard failure is actually more of a pain than a drive failure, as that requires restoring to dissimilar hardware and triggers software activation issues.
With regard to saving metadata to DNG files, someone pointed out to me that this can create large backups, as every time you update the metadata in a DNG file, the file will have changed, will get backed up again, and they can be quite large files.
A way to reduce the effect on incremental or differential backups, is to do all your keywording, titles, captions, copyright information, and basic adjustments immediately after you import into LRC, then save the metadata back to the DNG files straight away before you do a backup. After this, if you fiddle around and do further adjustments, work with virtual copies or at least don't keep saving your metadata back to the DNG files unless you have a really good reason.

---------- Post added 08-09-22 at 12:54 PM ----------

One thing to consider is what if you suddenly cease to be around.

Someone else has confirmed that with LRC, if you stop paying your Adobe subscription, you can't do any further adjustments, but you can still access your catalog and export photos.
I actually raised just this issue with Adobe in one of their popup feedback forms, stating that archiving was important, and someone should still be able to access my catalog if I'm not around to pay the bills.
I'm fine with how they've done things, as my edits are my personal expression, so as long as someone else can get them out of LR, they don't need to be able to edit them, or if they want to, fair enough if they need to get a subscription themselves.

[subsea]

I use a relatively high power iMac with a 2TB internal SSD, also using LRC (and ON1 and a number of other photo related apps). I have a couple of external 2TB SSDs, and created a bootable backup on each. Now, I update one of the backups every week, alternating drives. I'm never at risk of losing more than 1 week's images and have the benefit of not losing use of my computer if the internal SSD fails, because I can boot off of the latest backup.

[Digitalis]

NAS or gigantic external that gets put away when not in use.

A NAS is preferable due to their storage management features and storage redundancy capability. Single external drives are useful for off-site storage, though I personally I use a second NAS that is located elsewhere for off site storage, I still use stand alone volumes for critical backups, SSDs with SED capability fitted in portable enclosures are very useful and secure.

[CookieDave]

A NAS is preferable due to their storage management features and storage redundancy capability. Single external drives are useful for off-site storage, though I personally I use a second NAS that is located elsewhere for off site storage, I still use stand alone volumes for critical backups, SSDs with SED capability fitted in portable enclosures are very useful and secure.

NAS is definitely the way to go, especially if there’s an exhorbitant amount of data. My images luckily still fit within a sync service, so Dropbox has been working “okay” for the most part, though I understand that sync services are not the same as a proper backup service or system. If possible, try and follow 3-2-1. Three backups, two types of media, and one offline. Veeam has a decent article on this, along with some examples.

[Tas]

I do this as a hobby and use a NAS.

Mine is approx 8 years old and limited to HDD but newer units using SSD are what I'm looking at when it comes time to replace mine.

I use this as my primary storage with and automated separate back up.

Online back up can now also be done with the NAS system if I ever needed it.

I use ON1 but assume LR will be just as simple for identifying NAS drives.


Tas

[AstroDave]

A lot of folks are mentioning external SSDs as their backup devices.

I'm not so sure - unless you power them up from time to time, and maybe even copy some data back and forth.

I do love SSDs, and they comprise all my active drives. But for the most permanent off-line storage, I think an old-fashioned magnetic media hard drive should be in the mix.

Every now and then, I find a 15-20-year old hard drive (I've been using PCs since the very first IBMs - more than 40 years ago*). All the files there on have been still readable! I'm not sure that will be the case with an SSD that has sat for 20 years.

* a few years ago, I revved up a genuine IBM PC/AT that had sat idle for at least 30 years, before I sold it on ebay. It worked perfectly with the vintage 30 MB (!) hard drive.

[GUB]

Has anyone found any shortfalls with the Mdisc archival system.?
https://www.freevideoworkshop.com/what-is-an-m-disc/
I know we are going to have to wait a couple of hundred years to see if they are as good as they say, but they seem an awesome way to spread some archives around the family.

[Digitalis]

do love SSDs, and they comprise all my active drives. But for the most permanent off-line storage, I think an old-fashioned magnetic media hard drive should be in the mix.

The NAS devices I work with have a feature which uses NVME SSDs that are used for high priority file access and (with the use of clever software and user set heuristics) these NAS systems can automatically move files off the SSDs that are less frequently accessed to platter based magnetic drives for cold storage.

SSD's are great for video work where very high and consistent data rates easy to maintain compared to platter drives, but for photographic uses SSDs are a bit of overkill. Also considering the price of energy, platter based 6Tb drives can chew up 8W of energy each. Spanned over 4+ drives this can add up to quite a bit of energy used over time, SSDs use a fraction of that power as they have no moving parts.

[yucatanPentax]

Has anyone found any shortfalls with the Mdisc archival system.?
https://www.freevideoworkshop.com/what-is-an-m-disc/
I know we are going to have to wait a couple of hundred years to see if they are as good as they say, but they seem an awesome way to spread some archives around the family.

Thanks for sharing that. Very interesting. I had not heard of Mdiscs prior to this. It seems it may be one more tool to add to the chest.

[nosliwmit]

Leaving the technical storage part aside, I use a simple year/month folder structure and manage it in LR (still using LR6). For me that's just the simplest way to do it and it makes finding things fairly easy. Inside LR I have a number of Smart Collections (photos by camera, photos by lens, photos by specific keywords etc.). Smart Collections are a great feature.