Backup your files!!

[Raid]

They did a survey a few years back and Males rated a computer crash as more distressing than a relationship breakup. I will leave it to others to comment on the truthfulness of this survey.

Using a NAS (so that you have local redundancy) as your main source of long term storage is critical. These units are cheap and can provide you with both speed of access and redundancy for photos, videos, music, documents etc.

Once you have redundancy you then need a backup strategy. This can be either another NAS (in another location), tape or even one or more external drives (taken offsite).

Adobe have been pushing Cloud Services as the answer. For those who use Adobe products a lot, are well aware of their lack of even the most basic forms of support. They have always been very happy to take your money (in the case of Australia about 3 times what you pay in the US) but they have never been willing to help when things don't work as expected.

If you also read the Terms & Conditions for Cloud Services they state they Adobe does not guarantee that they will not loose all of your data. This means that you will still need to provide a backup.... if the data is important.

So if you want a long and happy relationship with your computer, think about how you will feel if you loose everything?

[Jonathan Huyer]

I store my raw files and my Lightroom catalog on an external drive. I copy the drive to a second drive, and then use CrashPlan to copy everything to the cloud.

[Jayson]

Loosing your hard drive stinks. I had the same problem last year but I am anal about backing up my files now that it has happened a couple times. The two times before I wasn't that into photography and it was more documents.

Does LR export sidecar files? That's how I save my edits in DxO, rather than in the catalog. The sidecar files (one per image, same name different extension) just get stored with the images, backed up with them, etc.

Yes LR does. I ran into a similar situation last year and found the little button to make the sidecar files. If you open up the catalog settings in the LR header, you can either check or uncheck the write directly into XMP file. I like that because I can open them up in Camera Raw if I am in a pinch and all of my stuff is there. Plus, I don't have to worry about constantly backing up my catalog to make sure the file has all of the adjustments.

[Kayaker72]

They did a survey a few years back and Males rated a computer crash as more distressing than a relationship breakup. I will leave it to others to comment on the truthfulness of this survey.

Ha....and here I thought the movie "Her" was science fiction.

A quick update. I looked into a service to recover the data. The "economy" quote was a range of $700-$2,500, if they are even successful, with it likely being in the $1,000-$2,000 range. That is with the "OCZ" discount. The "economy" range is lower than their other services as it is their slowest service. If you want faster, you pay more (they were saying it could be several weeks).

Just something to consider against the cost of a back up system.

[neuroanatomist]

Just something to consider against the cost of a back up system.

Storage is relatively cheap, and automated solutions are available. I got a great deal on LaCie Rugged bus-powered FW800/USB3 drives, and bought a bunch of them. I do regular full clones of my internal SSD (960 GB) to a pair of external drives, and I backup just my photo/video library to another pair (the idea being I can delete videos/movies if I need to recover space on my internal drive, which would delete them from the backup clones, too). I also have a couple of spare drives, just in case.