I do most of my photo work on my laptop. I have Lightroom 1.4 and CS3 on there. I import most photos into Lightroom as I have the catalogs set up the way I want them. Those that get additional editing in CS3 get saved back to Lightroom with the changes, and the original stays there as well. That has just been the way I've ended up doing my workflow as it works for me.

My question is about backing up. Currently, about once a week I will first hook up one external hard drive. I start with a folder 0001, and inside that folder create another folder called "photos". I have Lightroom backup the catalog into the 0001 (or whatever folder I'm on, I go sequentially). After that is done I select all in the "all photographs" folder and then hit export. I export all of the images, in original form (I set up a user preset to do this, all I have to change is the export location each time) to the "photos' folder inside the 0001 folder (or whatever number backup I'm on). When that is done I hook up a second external hard drive and do the same thing.

As time goes along and the hard drives start to fill up I will eliminate older folders from the external drives since more recent saves have all of the pics plus newer ones.

Is that an okay way to back up, and is there maybe a better way? From my understanding I need the catalog files if I want to be able to see the images that I've altered at all. Is that true?

Also, I am to the point that I have over 5k images on my laptop, culled down from many, many more as I'm pretty systematic about going through pics and eliminating after each import. I want to basically empty LR on my laptop and start over new, with some new folders and such. Is doing one last backup the way I'm doing it safe enough to then go ahead and delete everything in LR on my laptop? What is the best way to delete all of the images and folders and such in LR? Should I just delete it and reinstall it, or is there a better way?

Thanks in advance for any help or advice you can offer.

One of the problems I see is if you are only backing up once a week what would happen if you imported images and then your computer crashed before you backed up the photos? I would suggest backing up your new images as you are improting them for the 1st time into Lightroom.

Steve

Thanks Steve. My concern about backing up on import is that after I import images into LR, many of them get deleted as I go through them. Having all of the imported images, including ones that will be delted, seems like it would take up a lot of disk space. I shoot a lot of action sports and rattle off quite a few pics. Some days 75% of them end up getting delted as I'm going through them.

What you are doing will work fine (you may loose a few days though), but is very time consuming. I, also would be concerned about recent work. It should be backed up as well.

Personally I'd just use Microsofts synctoy (if you're on Windows). It will allow you to excatly duplicate the contents of one drive to another, including deletes if you want. You'd set it up to copy your catalogue and preview folders and another batch to do your image files. When you copy files to your working drive you do a backup immediately, so you have a backup. When you have culled and processed the remaining images you sync again and Synctoy will delete any images from your backup drive that you have deleted from your working drive. Doing this means you have and exact duplicate of your catalogue and working files at all times and it also means you don't need to worry about eliminating old folders.

It would also be much faster than a manual approach.

Gordon

Thanks Gordon, that sounds like it makes a lot of sense. I am using Windows so will have to download synctoy. Thanks much.