Mistake ONE -
I heard it often - back-up those photos!
Well I ignored this advice and I almost lost all my pic's from the last two years - about 1.8 terabytes worth.
I kept them on an external drive - 2 tb - Well I managed to get the drive up and running - whew!
Mistake TWO
I use Lightroom but never took advantage of the catalog. I just kept the images on my drive under the file names I chose.
Solution..... well this is where I need help. I am wondering if I can save all my images - perhaps through Lightroom somewhere over the rainbow in a cloud??
IF SO HOW??
OR
Is there another way you save all your images - edited JPEGS & RAW files?
Print some out.... i print a selection out every so often of my favourites. I have memory cards and laptop.... perhaps need to enter the modern world!!
@myhrhelper There are many cloud services, Google, Microsoft, Amazon. But you pay (quite a bit) for terabytes of data, every month. Why not buy a USB external drive? They usually come with automatic backup software, where you simply specify the directories you want backed up. If you exceed your internal drive capacity, then you have to try something else of course. I personally just have one (4TB) and every week or so I just copy the new files manually to an archive directory I created. Not very high tech, but I have the files in two places and it does for me, using the drag and drop File Explorer of Windows, nothing fancy. Takes a minute or two only.
You might also think of burning them onto DVDs as well, every month or so, so you have the files in yet another place, this time off line and non-volatile. Again the Windows File Explorer drag and drop works fine.
Thank you for your responses. I always keep my photos on an external hard drive I just never did a back up to it. Frank oh 4 tb for $160 would be good, I just bought another 2tb external. I really think I will need to keep my eyes on BP Photo and in the near future get a 4tb and just keep backing up my work on that. I think the cloud catalog in Lightroom is just using whatever cloud storage you have.
Short answer: I copy RAW images to an external drive as "backup", I upload JPG versions (export from LR, 80% quality, no resize, no output sharpening) of all the RAW images to a cloud service as an additional "worst-case" backup. Actually, let me correct that slightly. My photography business website is on SmugMug which has basically unlimited storage for my particular subscription. So, I use their LR plugin to upload the JPG to private/hidden "backup" galleries which serve as an archive. So while SmugMug is not a "cloud service" per se, it practically speaking performs the same function as if uploading to one of the others such as Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. And, prior to having SmugMug, I did use Dropbox for this purpose (i.e. archive JPGs).
The "Creative Cloud" aspect of LR is confusing I think. It's not really meant to store catalogs or images, although in theory one can. It's more meant to provide synchronization of Smart Previews for a catalog on multiple devices so you can "edit" images on various devices and the changes sync up to the device actually having the image stored on it.
One of the other cloud services mentioned above could be used to store catalogs and images, although 1) I'm currently not aware of any official LR plugin for any of these services, 2) if using the desktop sync applications for them where the file is synced every time a change is detected, you use a LOT of bandwidth when importing, processing, and exporting images. For that reason I avoided these sync applications uploaded directly to the cloud service (i.e. Dropbox) via their website uploader when a particular job was fully complete.
Long answer: This will actually be shorter than my short answer (because I'm not going to actually type out my long answer lol), but I just wanted to mention that I have a full file management workflow (LR importing custom options, folder naming conventions, copy off to external drives, etc). if you (or anyone else) is interested, tag me in a reply and I would be more than happy to take some time and describe it - in which case, that would be the full "long answer". :)
I print a lot of mine in the form of photo books. I found that if I didn't do that I hardly ever saw the pictures. I do the 12x12 inch size books so I can have big copies (one per page) of the better pics and multiple small pics per page of the ones I like but don't need their own page. And I have an external hard drive for backup to the internal drive storage as well.
If you use Amazon Prime (at least the UK version) it comes with unlimited photo storage. It accept Nikon .nef RAW files so imagine it does so for other common RAW formats. I currently have about 5Tb of RAW files as well as some .jpg . on Amazon cloud as a result. I also have it backed up locally to a NAS server set up with Raid5 (4 HDD 3 for striped data and one parity, allows recovery from 1 drive failure).
Ken Duncan, at his WOW Factor seminar cautioned about using the Cloud or any off-site 'in the ether' storage due to the fact that they aren't going to let you know if they go broke and your images will disappear forever...i don't use it
I had a majority of my photos backed up to an external hard drive, but unfortunately my family had movies on it also, I think it may have been dropped and won't open up anymore, so all gone. 😥
It still powers up but I can't get into any files. I've been told it could take hundreds of $ and they still may not be able to retrieve my photos.
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Here's a drive for $160.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1077555-REG/wd_wdbwlg0040hbk_nesn_4tb_elements_external_hd.html
If you want redundant/recoverable disks, you can buy USB RAID packages for twice that.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1053139-REG/wd_wdblwe0080jch_nesn_8tb_my_book_duo.html
You might also think of burning them onto DVDs as well, every month or so, so you have the files in yet another place, this time off line and non-volatile. Again the Windows File Explorer drag and drop works fine.
Thank you for your responses. I always keep my photos on an external hard drive I just never did a back up to it. Frank oh 4 tb for $160 would be good, I just bought another 2tb external. I really think I will need to keep my eyes on BP Photo and in the near future get a 4tb and just keep backing up my work on that. I think the cloud catalog in Lightroom is just using whatever cloud storage you have.
Short answer: I copy RAW images to an external drive as "backup", I upload JPG versions (export from LR, 80% quality, no resize, no output sharpening) of all the RAW images to a cloud service as an additional "worst-case" backup. Actually, let me correct that slightly. My photography business website is on SmugMug which has basically unlimited storage for my particular subscription. So, I use their LR plugin to upload the JPG to private/hidden "backup" galleries which serve as an archive. So while SmugMug is not a "cloud service" per se, it practically speaking performs the same function as if uploading to one of the others such as Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. And, prior to having SmugMug, I did use Dropbox for this purpose (i.e. archive JPGs).
The "Creative Cloud" aspect of LR is confusing I think. It's not really meant to store catalogs or images, although in theory one can. It's more meant to provide synchronization of Smart Previews for a catalog on multiple devices so you can "edit" images on various devices and the changes sync up to the device actually having the image stored on it.
One of the other cloud services mentioned above could be used to store catalogs and images, although 1) I'm currently not aware of any official LR plugin for any of these services, 2) if using the desktop sync applications for them where the file is synced every time a change is detected, you use a LOT of bandwidth when importing, processing, and exporting images. For that reason I avoided these sync applications uploaded directly to the cloud service (i.e. Dropbox) via their website uploader when a particular job was fully complete.
Long answer: This will actually be shorter than my short answer (because I'm not going to actually type out my long answer lol), but I just wanted to mention that I have a full file management workflow (LR importing custom options, folder naming conventions, copy off to external drives, etc). if you (or anyone else) is interested, tag me in a reply and I would be more than happy to take some time and describe it - in which case, that would be the full "long answer". :)
It still powers up but I can't get into any files. I've been told it could take hundreds of $ and they still may not be able to retrieve my photos.