Lightroom and Mac users - how do you back up your images and catalogue ?

justa1972

justa1972

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Justin
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Hi all

Would really appreciate some help !

I’ve recently replaced the fusion hard drive in my iMac with an SSD - due to my incompetence I have lost the last two years images (and emails I saved to my Mac)

I now have about 10k photos on an external HD but no catalogue so all the edits are obviously lost.

What is the easiest way to back up your images and catalogue in the future ? Is Time Machine the best option ?

The issue with this is that I will have to import all of those photos into LR in order to do a Time Machine back up - which risks slowing the HD down ?

Do you keep all your images on your mac HD ?

I realise there are a number of questions here and I hope this makes sense ?!

Thanks
 
Perhaps I shouldn't ask, but did you reformat the old hard drive? If not then recovery may be possible. If you did then it may still be possible to recover some of the images and data if they have not yet been over-written.

When I used a Mac, I would back up with Time Machine every week at least. Separate external hard drive a few of times the size of my SSD.
 
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I’ve recently backed up my MacBook to TimeMachine, because I wanted to update to a newer version of MacOS and wanted the option to go back to the earlier version if things didn’t work out. Pretty sure that would allow a full restoration of the Mac including files. So that is probably the best/easiest option. Does take a while (several hours) to create the first TimeMachine backup.

But, I usually just make sure I have copies all of my files including, music, images and LR libraries/catalogues to a couple of external hard drives. Also have working files stored on a NAS with only recent files on my MacBook (which only has a 512GB drive).

Should add that I did lose a bunch of images from 2009 due to a hard disc failure. Yep, had no backup of those. Lesson learned.
 
ancient_mariner said:
Perhaps I shouldn't ask, but did you reformat the old hard drive? If not then recovery may be possible. If you did then it may still be possible to recover some of the images and data if they have not yet been over-written.

When I used a Mac, I would back up with Time Machine every week at least. Separate external hard drive a few of times the size of my SSD.
Click to expand...
I had the Fusion Drive replaced on my iMac - I thought I had done a Time Machine back up and a separate back up of my photos but it turns out that this wasn't on the external HD. The person who carried out this work gave me back the original HD but said that he couldn't read any of the DATA - I have since learnt that you also need the small SSD to do this and so far I haven't been able to establish whether he still has this....
 
justa1972 said:
I now have about 10k photos on an external HD but no catalogue so all the edits are obviously lost.

What is the easiest way to back up your images and catalogue in the future ? Is Time Machine the best option ?

The issue with this is that I will have to import all of those photos into LR in order to do a Time Machine back up - which risks slowing the HD down ?

Do you keep all your images on your mac HD ?
Click to expand...
I do keep all my images on my Mac HD, but I am a heretic and have 99% JPEGs, otherwise that would be impossible due to size. I've thought of moving images off my HD via a NAS or similar, but then I wouldn't (easily) have access to those images when I go away.

I backup the MacHD with Time Machine in two different locations. I think I probably should have a second TM backup drive in a different place at home. My images are not in the C1Pro catalogue, but obviously all the edits are there. When C1Pro is closed it backs itself up to a file on the HD, which then gets backed up to TM. I maybe should have a cloud backup account for the Mac, but I already have to pay for one for the family PC...

I'm not entirely sure why you have to import your photos into LR before doing a backup. Is it possible to copy them onto your HD, do the TM backup, and then "import" them into LR by reference?
 
I have my Lightroom catalogues and work in in progress files on an external drive. I have separate external to back up the cat files and another external to back up the work in progress files.

Completed files are stored in the cloud and backed up to other external drives.
 
LR Catalog is stored on the internal drive of my MacBook Pro M1.

Recent (last six months or so) RAW files are held on the internal drive also,

After that, the RAWs cascade to a fast-ish 4TB NVMe SSD in a Thunderbolt enclosure, then onward to a slower 2TB Samsung T7 SSD and finally to 6TB spinning rust LaCie for the oldest pictures. I like to keep a float of ~15-20% free space on the SSDs.

LR catalog backups (as made by Lightroom itself) get saved directly onto the NVMe SSD weekly. A month later they get moved on to the slower LaCie to free up space.

For actual backup, onsite I use Time Machine to back up to a 22TB HDD directly attached to the Mac.

I also use BackBlaze, which backs up my files continuously off-site over my reasonably speedy fibre internet connection, in case the house burns down. Total there is around 8.5 TB currently.
 
I use Lr not LrC so everything is on the cloud.

I back up RAW files and the edited images to an external ssd and external HD and also have some on Amazon prime photos (as we have prime).

I keep little to nothing on my laptops (including my work laptop which is backed up to a one drive).
 
I've managed to get almost all my photos back from my SD cards !! I knew there was a reason I had so many !!

Even though they had been formatted I used EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard and was gob smacked that it worked !

Used the free version and then upgraded - £50 and I've got all my photos from 23-25 back :)
 
I stand to be corrected but as far as I know Time Machine does not save or create a bootable copy of your drive, it merely saves files as they were. In order to do what I think you want you need Carbon Copy Cloner which mirrors your Mac OS onto an external hard drive that is bootable should the worse happen.
 
PSILVERMAN said:
I stand to be corrected but as far as I know Time Machine does not save or create a bootable copy of your drive, it merely saves files as they were. In order to do what I think you want you need Carbon Copy Cloner which mirrors your Mac OS onto an external hard drive that is bootable should the worse happen.
Click to expand...
When I moved from Intel to Silicon I ran time machine on the old Macbook then 'restored ' the new M Macbook from the time machine, it brought over all my software and all my images. Obviously I had to update some of the software from the Intel version to the Silicon version but the most time consuming part of the changeover was checking that everything was there and working which it was.
Given that the operating system can be installed from Apple to the latest version that will work on the Mac, I don't see the point in making a bootable clone other than as a security blanket.
 
I’ve only just moved back to Mac after a gap of 10 years so in effect I’m relearning, I’m going on what Gemini told me so obviously it might not be right, I’ve yet to use CCC as I haven’t had time although I have downloaded it but I did use it back in the day.
 
So, I don't use Lightroom, but CaptureOne... but I think the same advice can apply:

I back up all my data with a set of hard disks, which I rotate and I simply use a script that does a robocopy (or rsync on Mac) all my files from my Data drive in the exact same structure to a external drive. I don't zip them or compress them or use a 3rd party tool.

Why you might ask?

Well, if we use a 3rd party bit of software that tries to be clever to compress, creates incrementals, dedupes etc, yes, we save some space, but testing that backup, unless you got another machine can be quite difficult - so, I just copy it. and then I can test whether files still open on the other drives very easily, and then I rotate them so I have some history.

It's not perfect, but it works well. After the initial copy to a new drive (which takes a few hours), the 'daily' backups take around 5-10 minutes.

If you have a drive failure in your machine, you can simply replace the drive, copy your info back from the latest backup, structure intact and... it should just work.
 
I keep the catalogue on the Max Mini, all the images on external SSD drive (NVME), backup on Timemachine and Backblaze. I have also uploaded all images to Amazon Photos.
 
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