# catalog - HD - EHD - cloud and backup



## Luc (Dec 27, 2014)

Hi, at the moment my workflow considering the catalog is as follows:

-pictures all on an EHD
-catalog on same EHD
-backup catalog every time I exit LR, backup to internal HD
-third party app backs up everything (pictures, catalog, presets ...) to Google Drive

Sounds as a good plan or do you have any tips on backing up more secure ?


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## clee01l (Dec 27, 2014)

In addition to TimeMachine (OSX app) for my local backup, I use CrashPlan for cloud backup.  CrashPlan costs $60/year for *unlimited* storage.  (I currently have ~750GB stored at Crashplan).  This is a lot cheaper than the 1TB Google Drive plan that you have now.

Running everything from the EHD has tradeoffs. It is good if you need to use your LR catalog from more than one machine.  Because it is a EHD, bandwidth can be a performance hit. If you are connected via USB2, you might be better off moving the catalog and the most active image files to a faster local drive.


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## Luc (Dec 28, 2014)

clee01l said:


> In addition to TimeMachine (OSX app) for my local backup, I use CrashPlan for cloud backup.  CrashPlan costs $60/year for *unlimited* storage.  (I currently have ~750GB stored at Crashplan).  This is a lot cheaper than the 1TB Google Drive plan that you have now.
> 
> Running everything from the EHD has tradeoffs. It is good if you need to use your LR catalog from more than one machine.  Because it is a EHD, bandwidth can be a performance hit. If you are connected via USB2, you might be better off moving the catalog and the most active image files to a faster local drive.



Crashplan seems indeed better... Bookmarked it for later review. 

The EHD is a solution I opted for to save space on my HD.  It's connected with USB3 and untill now I'm not experiencing any problems.


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## clee01l (Dec 28, 2014)

USB 3.0 has a theoretical transfer speed of 5Gbit/s. SATA 3 has a theoretical transfer speed of 6Gbit/s.  I would not worry too much about having all of your LR data on a USB3 EHD.  I would be more concerned about running a 32 bit OS which limits LR to 1GB of RAM.


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## Luc (Dec 28, 2014)

clee01l said:


> USB 3.0 has a theoretical transfer speed of 5Gbit/s. SATA 3 has a theoretical transfer speed of 6Gbit/s.  I would not worry too much about having all of your LR data on a USB3 EHD.  I would be more concerned about running a 32 bit OS which limits LR to 1GB of RAM.



Yeah,  I'm not worried at all with speeds.  Just wondering if my backup work flow is up to standards


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## Tony Jay (Dec 28, 2014)

Hi Luc, the answer to your question is very simple:
If fire, flood, or theft (insert your particular flavour of disaster here) destroys your computer hardware right now will you be able to recover your entire image collection and catalog in a day or so?

Having everything backup up on the cloud seems ideal but in reality how long would it take to download the entire collection?
Unless you have access to amazing bandwidth then it will be a good while I would suggest.

Redundancy is key and also having hard drives in remote locations that cannot be harmed by the same disaster that destroys your computer hardware. This is simple to achieve with several (not one) backup EHDD's where having a drive (two is better) stored in a bank vault or your brother's house. As long as it is not likely to be affected by the same problem that kills off your main computer that is what you want. Rotate the remote EHDD weekly or fortnightly with a more up-to-date EHDD and then take it back home and update it.
This allows both a backup and an archive (semantic distinctions aside it is important to have both)

If a disaster wipes out your system then restoring everything with the current archive EHDD with a small contribution from the cloud storage (a week or two of images and work) will be quick and practical.

Tony Jay


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## clee01l (Dec 28, 2014)

Cloud services such as Crash plan will ship you (for a fee) a HDD copy of your Cloud store data if you need to recover the whole enchilada.  the problem with bank vaults etc, is that the backups there are often stale.  EHD backups are good for failed HDDs and Stupid User mistakes but don't provide sufficient disaster recovery for wide area catastrophic events or even local disasters that might destroy your home and all of your local backups.


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## Luc (Dec 29, 2014)

Tony Jay said:


> Hi Luc, the answer to your question is very simple:
> If fire, flood, or theft (insert your particular flavour of disaster here) destroys your computer hardware right now will you be able to recover your entire image collection and catalog in a day or so?
> 
> Having everything backup up on the cloud seems ideal but in reality how long would it take to download the entire collection?
> ...



Hi Tony Jay,  I agree that several EHD,  kept off site are ideal but since I don't make my bucks with my pictures I'm quite satisfied knowing that everything is backed up in the cloud. I'm on a 6 MB fibre optic connection and in worse case scenario it could me take a few hours but that's no big deal in my particular case.


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## Luc (Dec 29, 2014)

clee01l said:


> Cloud services such as Crash plan will ship you (for a fee) a HDD copy of your Cloud store data if you need to recover the whole enchilada.  the problem with bank vaults etc, is that the backups there are often stale.  EHD backups are good for failed HDDs and Stupid User mistakes but don't provide sufficient disaster recovery for wide area catastrophic events or even local disasters that might destroy your home and all of your local backups.



Seems like Crah plan really is worth looking into.  Ar you a long term user of their products?


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## clee01l (Dec 29, 2014)

Luc said:


> Seems like Crah plan really is worth looking into.  Ar you a long term user of their products?


I'm going on my second year.  Before that I used Carbonite.  Carbonate, after 4 years of waiting, still did not have a plan on the Mac that included anything other than the primary drive. (Carbonite does for Windows but for an extra fee.  Crashplan lets me backup locally and to the cloud with the same app.  I've been very happy with the backups and the restore tests that I have run.  It takes about 2 months to fully backup 3/4 TB of user data After that it is seamless.  So having a local backup is always a good idea.


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## Tony Jay (Dec 29, 2014)

clee01l said:


> Cloud services such as Crash plan will ship you (for a fee) a HDD copy of your Cloud store data if you need to recover the whole enchilada.  *the problem with bank vaults etc, is that the backups there are often stale*.  EHD backups are good for failed HDDs and Stupid User mistakes but don't provide sufficient disaster recovery for wide area catastrophic events or even local disasters that might destroy your home and all of your local backups.


Sure, however it is possible to do things this way.
It just takes a bit of discipline to keep rotating an EHDD every week or two.

Tony Jay


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## Tony Jay (Dec 29, 2014)

Luc said:


> Hi Tony Jay,  I agree that several EHD,  kept off site are ideal but *since I don't make my bucks with my pictures *I'm quite satisfied knowing that everything is backed up in the cloud. I'm on a 6 MB fibre optic connection and in worse case scenario it could me take a few hours but that's no big deal in my particular case.


Perhaps the biggest mistake people make with digital data is to assume that if they are not making money with it, in this case images, then a comprehensive backup plan is not really required.
In fact the value of these images far transcends any monetary value.
(I think you "get it" so this reply is meant for broader consumption - a good DAM system is not just for pro's.)

Tony Jay


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## Jim Wilde (Dec 29, 2014)

Tony Jay said:


> Sure, however it is possible to do things this way.
> It just takes a bit of discipline to keep rotating an EHDD every week or two.
> 
> Tony Jay


 
+1 to this.


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## Luc (Dec 29, 2014)

clee01l said:


> I'm going on my second year.  Before that I used Carbonite.  Carbonate, after 4 years of waiting, still did not have a plan on the Mac that included anything other than the primary drive. (Carbonite does for Windows but for an extra fee.  Crashplan lets me backup locally and to the cloud with the same app.  I've been very happy with the backups and the restore tests that I have run.  It takes about 2 months to fully backup 3/4 TB of user data After that it is seamless.  So having a local backup is always a good idea.



Nice.  Definitely going to look into it.


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## Harley_Rider (Dec 29, 2014)

I can +1 for Crash Plan, like Cletus I switched from Carbonite because of the options Crash Plan offered.    When it comes to backing up, here is a quote from a tech blog I read a while ago: "1 copy is not a backup, remember 3-2-1, 3 copies, 2 different media, and 1 offsite."


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## clee01l (Dec 29, 2014)

Tony Jay said:


> Sure, however it is possible to do things this way.
> It just takes a bit of discipline to keep rotating an EHDD every week or two.
> 
> Tony Jay


It also takes manual effort and leg work on the part of the user.  I guess that I'm just not that disciplined.  Having to make a run to the bank safe deposit box every week or two is not something that I want to add to my schedule.


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## Luc (Dec 29, 2014)

clee01l said:


> It also takes manual effort and leg work on the part of the user.  I guess that I'm just not that disciplined.  Having to make a run to the bank safe deposit box every week or two is not something that I want to add to my schedule.



I'm with Cletus on this one.


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## Jim Wilde (Dec 29, 2014)

Of course it doesn't have to be literally in a bank safe deposit box, just somewhere off-site and easily accessible. In my case my backup drives are kept at my Mother-in-Law's apartment a mile down the road, and I can switch drives on one of the several visits I make each week. 

No big deal either way, we all agree that a reliable off-site backup of some description is needed....how we choose to effect that is largely immaterial.


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## Victoria Bampton (Dec 29, 2014)

We really should have an affiliate link for Crashplan! LOL  I've been using them for 5 years +, there's about 1.5 TB in the cloud, and they've been great.  I did offsite hard drive backups for a while, but they ended up out of date too quickly so I gave up in the end.  The initial upload took a few months on my slow (at the time) connection, during which time I maintained by hard drive offsite backups.


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## Luc (Dec 29, 2014)

Jim Wilde said:


> No big deal either way, we all agree that a reliable off-site backup of some description is needed....how we choose to effect that is largely immaterial.



Yeah,  that's correct but sometimes I wonder if we're not getting too paranoid. In my particular case i believe that cloud backup is efficient enough... Granted,  if your cloud storage isn't a shady company of course...


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## Luc (Dec 29, 2014)

Victoria Bampton said:


> We really should have an affiliate link for Crashplan! LOL  I've been using them for 5 years +, there's about 1.5 TB in the cloud, and they've been great.  I did offsite hard drive backups for a while, but they ended up out of date too quickly so I gave up in the end.  The initial upload took a few months on my slow (at the time) connection, during which time I maintained by hard drive offsite backups.



Untill now I never heard of Crashplan but I'm definitely gonna switch over... First getting my CC subscription done and keyword list...


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## clee01l (Dec 29, 2014)

Victoria Bampton said:


> We really should have an affiliate link for Crashplan! LOL  I've been using them for 5 years +, there's about 1.5 TB in the cloud, and they've been great.  I did offsite hard drive backups for a while, but they ended up out of date too quickly so I gave up in the end.  The initial upload took a few months on my slow (at the time) connection, during which time I maintained by hard drive offsite backups.


Maybe you should hit them up for a support Advert.


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## Victoria Bampton (Dec 29, 2014)

It turns out our Skimlinks plug-in does convert any links to https://www.code42.com/crashplan/ to an affiliate link to help support the site.


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## Jim Wilde (Dec 29, 2014)

Paranoid? Sure, but I know several photographers who would say there's no such thing as "*too* paranoid"!


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## camner (Dec 30, 2014)

Another +1 for Crashplan. I've been using a family plan for 2+ years and a daughter has used CP for a little over a year.


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## Luc (Dec 27, 2014)

Hi, at the moment my workflow considering the catalog is as follows:

-pictures all on an EHD
-catalog on same EHD
-backup catalog every time I exit LR, backup to internal HD
-third party app backs up everything (pictures, catalog, presets ...) to Google Drive

Sounds as a good plan or do you have any tips on backing up more secure ?


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## Luc (Dec 31, 2014)

Jim Wilde said:


> Paranoid? Sure, but I know several photographers who would say there's no such thing as "*too* paranoid"!



Sure there is... EHD in a bank vault and one day the bank gets assualted and every vault is cleaned... So?  :hail:


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## Jim Wilde (Dec 31, 2014)

And that's why we have multiple backups, right? We have to think of all possible contingencies....


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## davidedric (Dec 31, 2014)

And then decide which ones we want to guard against


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## jimmoor1 (Dec 31, 2014)

I'm looking for potential Cloud backup solutions for my LR5 Catalog,etc. I use a MacBook Pro for Lightroom. I see a lot of Forum members use Crashplan for backup which I've not used. I'm considering Mosaic archive software backup  via Google cloud.(http://www.mosaicarchive.com/2014/06/17/time-for-a-change-integrating-with-google-drive/ )

I can't find much comment/ review of Mosaic here or via Google searching. Appreciate anyone's experience or comment on Mosaic.    Thx, 
Jim


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## Victoria Bampton (Dec 31, 2014)

I haven't used their Archive software, but their View software works well.  I've had the pleasure of chatting to them on the phone once or twice, and they seem to be good guys.


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