Storage / Lightroom

Hello

I have been using Lightroom for about 2 years on my laptop, and like a complete n00b I don't have anything backed up anywhere and having so many RAW files and edited copies saved on my laptop is having an effect on its performance.

What do people do for storage, physical or cloud-based, and what is the best way for me to get all the image files off my laptop?

I have little to no understanding of how Lightroom stores my images/catalogs.

Storing RAWs in the cloud is a bit of a pain but can obviously be done. I'd just buy a couple of external drives and have more than one physical backup, preferably in different locations.

Okay, not a bad plan - might just stick final edits in the cloud and store everything else on externals.

That's pretty much what I use Flickr for – Just export everything I want to keep and save it there.

Is there a size limit on files on Flickr?

200mb per file is the limit. Think you'll be safe with that!
You get 1TB free storage

Winner - thanks everyone

Think Flickr has a 1TB limit, it's only the edited jpgs on there though, not the RAWs.

Personally I back up the RAW files to cloud and when Lightroom closes it backs up the catalogues to a location that is also synced to cloud.

I use Onedrive for cloud backup. You get 1TB free if you subscribe to Office. Given I need Office and that costs about £30 a year it seems like a good deal.

I also sync the RAWs and catalogue to another drive on my network as a local backup.

My two pennies: Get yourself a NAS with some redundancy.

I personally keep only my latest unworked orginals on my HDD, and when I edited all my pics, the originals go on the NAS and the edited pictures in one of my Data Drives in RAW format. I then add all my edited forlder in Lightroom so that if I need to upload to FBook or Flickr or just review them, I can just do it right in Lightroom without having to export locally in JPG.

I pretty much do the same as Aggi - local sync to NAS which in turn replicates to another off-site NAS

I do this so all edits and access are on local (fast) storage with bit local and remote copies to restore from

I do

Desktop SSD <-> NAS <-> Amazon Photos
Desktop SSD <-> CrashPlan

Figure with that level of backups I should be ok

This is all driving me a bit mad... I store images/videos from SD cards as well as music/movies on a external 4TB hard drive , images/videos backed up on Amazon Drive. movies/music not precious about enough to back up.

Dropbox for documents and working folders containing some datasets and code for Python/R etc. I also have access to onedrive via work.

What drives me mad is fitting icloud and iphone photos into that plan. ideas?

is flickr the way forward for image hosting?

Just got really pissed off with photobucket.

You have to pay for Flickr Pro now if you want to store mass amounts of images, think it's about £50 a year.

Yeah, Flickr ain’t free but it’s still pretty good and doesn’t compress your images to shit. Plus, it’s easy to embed from.

I don't mind paying for Flickr.

Ironically, photobucket was working fine, had used it for image hosting in a low demand kind of way for years. One day, I got a message saying that I'd exceeded the number of free images. So I paid for it for a year. Ever since then it's been shit.

So I think I will reduce the number of images in PB to the free limit so I can retain linked images, and get a Flickr account.

Is anyone using google one/ photos to back up? I use it for all my personal phone stuff but may stump up for the paid version so I can use it to back everything up.

Or are there better/ cheaper alternatives?

Posting here instead of starting a new thread.

My wife and I both use Lightroom to organise/edit our photos. We have our own folders on the internal HD in the pc which is easy enough to organise but when it comes to backing stuff up we each have our own external hdds and this is where it gets tricky.

Which ever hdd we plug into lightroom it sees it as the G drive so its expecting my images to be on her hdd and vice versa.

Anyone know if/how you can make lightroom identify each drive independently?

Not used Lightroom in a while, but sounds like a Windows problem. You need to assign a drive letter to each of your external drives. G for yours and H for hers, perhaps.

This'll tell you how.