# Lightroom CC > moving photos from one external drive to another



## Bektravels (Jul 6, 2017)

Hi all, I've done lots of searching on the web but was wondering if there's a better way to transfer 1tb/100,000 photos (my entire LR catalogue) from one external hard drive (it's now full) to another new (bigger) external one.

I know you can do it all through LR and that's great for a small/med amount of photos but because I'm talking 100,000 pics I'm wondering if there's a less laborious way.

I was wondering... can I clone the old drive to the new (by a backup prog like carbon copy cloner) to create an exact replica which would hopefully be recognised, no probs, by LR?? Is that possible?

Or some other way?

I don't want to do it via Finder because I don't wanna relink 100,000 pics...

There's gotta be an easy way to do this and have LR not spit chips trying to marry up files!


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## Johan Elzenga (Jul 6, 2017)

Yes, you can clone the current disk to a new and bigger disk. If you make sure that the new disk has the same name as the old disk, that is all you need to do. Lightroom will recognize the new disk as if it were the old one, so you do not even have to 'reconnect' the images. Just make sure that you do not have _both_ disks (with the same name) mounted when you start Lightroom, because that will obviously confuse the heck out of Lightroom. Dismount the old disk or change its name first before you start Lightroom again.


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## Bektravels (Jul 6, 2017)

JohanElzenga said:


> Yes, you can clone the current disk to a new and bigger disk. If you make sure that the new disk has the same name as the old disk, that is all you need to do. Lightroom will recognize the new disk as if it were the old one, so you do not even have to 'reconnect' the images. Just make sure that you do not have _both_ disks (with the same name) mounted when you start Lightroom, because that will obviously confuse the heck out of Lightroom. Dismount the old disk or change its name first before you start Lightroom again.



Thanks for the quick reply Johan - just what I was hoping to do, will give it a go overnight, cheers!


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## Linwood Ferguson (Jul 6, 2017)

You may want to either find some software that will do verify-after-write, or something that will compare the two after copying (sorry, I know only windows software for such).

There is a very low, but not negligible chance during the copy/clone operation that something will be corrupted.  Not likely, but when moving very large numbers of files and amount of data, it is nice to have a double check afterwards, especially since nothing in Lightroom is going to verify all the bits are identical before and after (well, absent everything being DNG and using that checksum but even that only checks internal image data nothing else).

I'm a fan of Teracopy on Windows, but don't know the Mac world.

Again, very low chance, if the advice comes too late do not sweat it.  But if you like belts and suspenders for such things...

Linwood


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## Jimmsp (Jul 6, 2017)

I would recommend that you use the OS. If all your photos are in an upper level folder, like "All Photos", then all you have to do is relink that folder. LR will find the rest.
Or, just rename the new hard drive the same as the old one (as Johan said), and give it the same drive letter.

I say this, as I once did this, moving >100,000 photos in multiple subfolders - and LR failed to move them all. I have read that others have experienced similar things with very large number of photos.


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## Johan Elzenga (Jul 6, 2017)

Jimmsp said:


> I would recommend that you use the OS. If all your photos are in an upper level folder, like "All Photos", then all you have to do is relink that folder. LR will find the rest.
> Or, just rename the new hard drive the same as the old one (as Johan said), and give it the same drive letter.



Macs don't use a drive letter, but a disk name. Internally they are even more intelligent, and assign a unique ID to each disk, so that even two disks with the same name can be recognized. However, because Lightroom uses a simple path, Lightroom does not know the difference and in this case that is actually an advantage. That's why you don't have to 'reconnect' the folders if the disk names are the same. If you used Aperture, you would have to 'reconnect' the folders, because Aperture uses the OS to recognize disks and so Aperture does see the difference between the new and the old disk.


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## Bektravels (Jul 7, 2017)

JohanElzenga said:


> Yes, you can clone the current disk to a new and bigger disk. If you make sure that the new disk has the same name as the old disk, that is all you need to do. Lightroom will recognize the new disk as if it were the old one, so you do not even have to 'reconnect' the images. Just make sure that you do not have _both_ disks (with the same name) mounted when you start Lightroom, because that will obviously confuse the heck out of Lightroom. Dismount the old disk or change its name first before you start Lightroom again.



Thanks for the quick reply Rohan - just what I was hoping to do, will give it a go overnight, cheers!


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## Bektravels (Jul 7, 2017)

Thanks for the thoughts everyone!

I cloned the new drive from the old with carbon copy cloner (figure this will verify all is copied with no errors) then renamed the new drive to be the same as the old.

Opened LR and it didn't miss a beat, works perfectly.

Stoked!

Should've mentioned this was on OSX.


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## LouieSherwin (Jul 7, 2017)

Bektravels said:


> I cloned the new drive from the old with carbon copy cloner (figure this will verify all is copied with no errors) then renamed the new drive to be the same as the old.



I'm glad you got this work. However, Carbon Copy Cloner does not do a verify after write except as a separate clone operation. To do that you need make a second run immediately after the initial clone using the "Find and replace corrupted files" option to verify your backup as explained in the Advanced Settings of the CCC online help. 

Verifying files copied from one location to another is tricky. This is because all modern OSs will buffer disk blocks in RAM to speed up IO. This frequently means that a read after write of the same data usually comes from the RAM and not from the file on disk so there have to be some special steps to force the OS to really re-read the data from the disk. 

ChronoSync is another excellent tool running on MacOS for copying and has an option to verify after copy. I have conversed with ChronoSync technical support and they claim that they have worked around the buffering issue and verify against the data on the output disk. 

As Ferguson says there is a very small but real possibility especially while copying a large number of files that something can happen on the actual physical write to the target disk where the file is somehow corrupted but the OS would not detect the error. You would not discover this until at some later date you tried to edit the corrupted image in Lightroom. This is why it is recommended to use a application that will verify the copy when moving a large collection of images to a new hard drive. 


-louie


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## Linwood Ferguson (Jul 7, 2017)

LouieSherwin said:


> Verifying files copied from one location to another is tricky. This is because all modern OSs will buffer disk blocks in RAM to speed up IO. This frequently means that a read after write of the same data usually comes from the RAM and not from the file on disk so there have to be some special steps to force the OS to really re-read the data from the disk.


Just dismount the drive and re-mount it to flush any buffers. I ASSUME but am not sure that any application aiming to do a verify pass would do that internally as well, but it's a fair point.


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## Bakkerger (Aug 2, 2017)

LouieSherwin said:


> I'm glad you got this work. However, Carbon Copy Cloner does not do a verify after write except as a separate clone operation. To do that you need make a second run immediately after the initial clone using the "Find and replace corrupted files" option to verify your backup as explained in the Advanced Settings of the CCC online help.you can transfer Android data to Android
> 
> Verifying files copied from one location to another is tricky. This is because all modern OSs will buffer disk blocks in RAM to speed up IO. This frequently means that a read after write of the same data usually comes from the RAM and not from the file on disk so there have to be some special steps to force the OS to really re-read the data from the disk.
> 
> ...


There is no difficulty , because i have successful transfer data from Android to another Android phone , and between different two device to transfer photos will come true ,


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