Backing up with Lightroom...

[specialman]

Forgive me if this seems long-winded but there is a point....

I have a MBP with a 250GB HD that contains loads of work and personal stuff. The images are all loaded up through LR2 so I can tweak shots, although only about 20% of the total 15,000 shots are tweaked.

Some of the personal stuff is in one place, some it another - it's a real mess. The work stuff is all in one folder with sub-folders for each job, so that's pretty straightfoward to keep track of.

My MBP is now full so everything has to go onto an external HD so I can free up some space. I'll be getting another identical external so I can have a back-up drive so no worries there in terms of making sure everything's safe.

I've been using Time Machine, which is hassle-free, but will only back-up what's on your hard drive so I'm on a 250GB limit there, which means I've been 'slimming' down image folders (i.e. getting rid) so I can put things on my laptop for backing up.

From now on I want to back to manually back-up so I can just add folder/images to the external rather than deleting on my MBP to make room for the Time Machine back-up.

First thing's first, I'll make a copy of the LR2 catalogue, place it on the external HD and then delete the original catalogue. This should mean my catalogue is saved elsewhere without LR2 losing the link with the images, right?

But then I need to re-position all the files manually on the external, which will break the link to LR2 I take it - I don't fancy manually re-linking them so what's the best way to move the folders over to a HD while keeping everything 'live' within LR2?

I know I could just re-import everything from scratch, that would be the simplest way, but that would mean I lose the tweaks on that 20% of my image archive because it's not embedded into the image, just the LR2 catalogue which will see the re-imported files as new ones - right?

I'm in a bit of a muddle here because I don't want to loose all those LR2 tweaks I made to images.

 

[Craikeybaby]

You could add the external drive locations in LR2 and move the files from there, that would keep the link.

You could also embed the meta data into the DNG (or create LR will automatically create a sidecar file if you're using NEFs).

 

[Chappers]

You do have a couple of options. Copy the Lightroom catalogue and the images to a new external drive. When you start Lightroom hold down the alt/option key and you'll get a dialogue box asking what catalogue you want to use. Now simply point it to the copy catalogue on your external. You will now also get a a lot of ? marks on the images. Right click on the root folder and select "Update Folder Location". It's the second from the bottom I think. Now simply point it to the root folder on the external drive and it should update. Check all is OK before deleting the images on your computer.

Another way is to simply move the files to the external drive and leave the catalogue on the MBP. then simply update folder location. You may find this option runs quicker, I did.