# Hard drive failure that contain your catalog!



## Robin Gerke (Apr 9, 2018)

My name is Robin. I have been photographing food over 50 years. Now is the time I  make a catalog of my images. I have been scanning a labeling in a considerate manner all the images. While I am getting the volumes done with the process of occurred to that in any computer setting the hard drive can fail with images within a the location of these imges. As I have read location is everything! What does one do in this situation! Or do to prevent such situation developing?
Please share your thoughts. Thanks.


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## Jimmsp (Apr 9, 2018)

Most of us plan to have a hard drive fail. We back up the hard drive to an external hard drive. I back them up 2 times (two external drives) and do that daily. I also back them up to a 3rd drive about once a month that I keep in a different location.
My backups include both my photos and my catalog - I don't count on the LR catalog backup, though I let that happen. That gives me another backup of the catalog.


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## clee01l (Apr 9, 2018)

Welcome to the forum.
In addition to Jim’s excellent advice, I’ll add this. : Strictly speaking, this is not a light room issue. This is a system issue that applies to any critical data that you store on the computer. You need to be prepared for when your hard drive fails. As it will certainly feel some point in the life of  your computer. 
 your iMac times with excellent back up software that as far as I know is not duplicated on a Windows machine even with third-party apps. You can use Time Machine as it comes with your operating system or you can tweak it to include or exclude files or folders that you do not want To back up. “Out-of-the-box” Time Machine will back up  all of the critical files on your local primary hard drive. Some of these like Lightroom previews are not necessary to be backed up. And in some cases many people store their master image files on an external hard drive which should be included in the backup by time machine.  Time Machine will back up all of your critical data from multiple hard drives to a single external hard drive or alternating external hard drive‘s and even a networked Time Capsule. I strongly recommend that you start your system back up using Time Machine. If you need help you can ask here for assistance in setting up your back up.


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