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Author Topic: filled the disc on my Mac  (Read 3642 times)

michael ellis

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filled the disc on my Mac
« on: September 14, 2013, 11:10:10 am »

I have almost filled the hard drive on my Mac. I want to move my lightroom catalog to a separate hard drive and back that up to another hard drive thus creating lots of free space in my Mac's hard drive. I would like the backups to happen automatically. Any help or advice would be appreciated. Does the software only backup new files and additions or does it copy the whole catalog every time it backs up? Does anyone have any recommendations for hard drives and software?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Sincerely,

Michael
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Jeremy Roussak

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Re: filled the disc on my Mac
« Reply #1 on: September 16, 2013, 03:49:40 am »

I have almost filled the hard drive on my Mac. I want to move my lightroom catalog to a separate hard drive and back that up to another hard drive thus creating lots of free space in my Mac's hard drive. I would like the backups to happen automatically. Any help or advice would be appreciated. Does the software only backup new files and additions or does it copy the whole catalog every time it backs up? Does anyone have any recommendations for hard drives and software?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Sincerely,

Michael

Time Machine does incremental backups (only files which have changed), although it gives an illusion of having copied everything. It will back up files on every drive connected to your Mac, unless you tell it otherwise. I find it works well (my laptop died suddenly and I was able to restore absolutely everything to my new machine from my TM backup); and it has the inestimable advantage of being free.

If you move only your LR catalogue, though, you probably won't free up that much space. Where do you keep your image files?

Others will chime in with hardware recommendations.

Jeremy
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BJL

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Re: filled the disc on my Mac
« Reply #2 on: September 16, 2013, 09:40:15 am »

If I understand correctly, the thing to do is to move the original image files to the second disk, and to do this from within Lightroom, so that the catalog knows about the new locations.

Here I assume that you are importing to Lightroom by "linking" rather that by copying. If instead you are copying into Lightroom ... you might want to stop doing it that way!
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michael ellis

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Re: filled the disc on my Mac
« Reply #3 on: September 16, 2013, 02:24:13 pm »

Time Machine does incremental backups (only files which have changed), although it gives an illusion of having copied everything. It will back up files on every drive connected to your Mac, unless you tell it otherwise. I find it works well (my laptop died suddenly and I was able to restore absolutely everything to my new machine from my TM backup); and it has the inestimable advantage of being free.

If you move only your LR catalogue, though, you probably won't free up that much space. Where do you keep your image files?

Others will chime in with hardware recommendations.

Jeremy

Hi Jeremy-Thank you for your response. I think I am using the wrong terminology here. I want to move the image files from my Mac's hard drive to a external hard drive and then be able to back that drive up to yet another external hard drive. I think I also want to keep my lightroom catalog on the drive with the image files but could be wrong about that. Sorry for the confusion. I do use time machine to back up the Mac and will continue to do so. My Mac is mainly full of photo files.

Sincerely,

Michael

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michael ellis

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Re: filled the disc on my Mac
« Reply #4 on: September 16, 2013, 02:33:59 pm »

If I understand correctly, the thing to do is to move the original image files to the second disk, and to do this from within Lightroom, so that the catalog knows about the new locations.

Here I assume that you are importing to Lightroom by "linking" rather that by copying. If instead you are copying into Lightroom ... you might want to stop doing it that way!

Hi BJL-

Thank you for your reply. I don't understand the "linking" versus "copying" reference. I import off my cameras cards using the import function of lightroom by copying the files to my hard drive. When I take a file into Photoshop and rename it I use the "synchronize folder" feature to add it to the Lightroom catalog. If I am scanning negs or slides I write them to my hard drive and then synchronize the folder they are in. Let me know if I am missing anything here.

Thanks again for your time.

Sincerely,

Michael



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Jeremy Roussak

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Re: filled the disc on my Mac
« Reply #5 on: September 16, 2013, 02:48:12 pm »

Hi Jeremy-Thank you for your response. I think I am using the wrong terminology here. I want to move the image files from my Mac's hard drive to a external hard drive and then be able to back that drive up to yet another external hard drive. I think I also want to keep my lightroom catalog on the drive with the image files but could be wrong about that. Sorry for the confusion. I do use time machine to back up the Mac and will continue to do so. My Mac is mainly full of photo files.

Time Machine will deal with your backup, then. As I wrote, it backs up external disks as well as internals. The only issue is that after you've copied your image files to your new external HD, it won't realise that they're the same files as were previously on your internal and will back them all up again, so you'll have two copies on the backup drive for a while. As long as it's big enough, it won't matter.

You can keep your LR catalogue and your image files wherever you like, provided that the catalogue knows where the image files are. The easy way to keep that link is to use LR itself to transfer the image files from internal to external; whether it's the fastest way, I've no idea. Similarly, whether it's a good idea to move the catalogue to the external depends on a host of factors, such as disk speed, on which I wouldn't like to comment.

Jeremy
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BJL

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Re: filled the disc on my Mac
« Reply #6 on: September 17, 2013, 09:00:54 pm »

... I don't understand the "linking" versus "copying" reference. I import off my cameras cards using the import function of lightroom by copying the files to my hard drive.
Forget what I said then: I was talking about the different situation, where I first import photos from card to computer with the built-in Image Capture (because I like to sort the JPEG's from raw files and then import just the latter to Lightroom). So I am then importing to Lightroom from a folder on my computer, and this gives options like "Copy" and "Add". The first creates a second copy within Lightroom, whereas "Add" just indexes the current location of each original, and the latter is what I meant by "Linking".

Importing directly from the card to Lightroom avoids that duplication issue ... but it might help in your case to first download from card to the external disk, and then import from disk drive to Lightroom with the "Add" option.
« Last Edit: September 17, 2013, 09:12:10 pm by BJL »
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Jeremy Roussak

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Re: filled the disc on my Mac
« Reply #7 on: September 18, 2013, 04:01:00 am »

Importing directly from the card to Lightroom avoids that duplication issue ... but it might help in your case to first download from card to the external disk, and then import from disk drive to Lightroom with the "Add" option.

Why is that ever a good idea? I'm not being aggressive: I'm genuinely curious. It seems to add an unnecessary step to the workflow.

Jeremy
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BJL

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saving raw+JPEG to disc first, then importing raw (but not JPEG) to Lightroom
« Reply #8 on: September 20, 2013, 02:36:54 pm »

Why is that ever a good idea? I'm not being aggressive: I'm genuinely curious. It seems to add an unnecessary step to the workflow.

Jeremy
It makes sense for me, but in large part because I use raw plus JPEG mode, and do a lot of basic tasks with the camera's JPEGs, which with my [Olympus] cameras are often completely satisfactory. For example, when only a basic crop of a good camera JPEG is needed, cropping that JPEG in Preview(!) is the quickest way. So I want to separate the files into folders for JPEG and for raw, and import only the latter into Lightroom. For me, shooting raw-only and then having to use Lightroom to convert every image that I want in JPEG format would "add an unnecessary step to the workflow."

I also use tools other than Lightroom, and so want to avoid mixing their output into the folder where Lightroom has "catalogued" raw files --- though I do not know if that would actually be a problem. (Edit: for example, I put albums onto my iPad after arranging them in iPhoto, so want a folder of just JPEGs to drop into iPhoto.)

And the default folder naming and organizing  convention used by Lightroom is not to my taste, so I prefer to handle that "filing" step in the Finder before importing to Lightroom.
« Last Edit: September 21, 2013, 12:31:11 pm by BJL »
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