Is there an easy way to do this?

[mpost]

I keep my LightRoom Catalogue, Presets and photographs on an external drive.  I manually back up to another external drive.

I am experiencing an issue that when I launch the catalogue from the back-up external, Lightroom indicates that the photos are missing and indicates the photos are on the first external drive. 

Is there a way to associate the photographs with the catalogue and not the name of the actual external drive? 

I know that I can use the Locate feature, but that is time consuming considering I have over 39,000 photographs.  I now load the Lightroom catalogue using the Control key, but somehow Lightroom keeps looking for the photographs on the first external drive.  I have unmounted it, so I need to find away to remove the drive name from the path of the photographs

What started this is that my main external 500 GB drive is full, so I have been using my 2TB external drive that I use for back ups as my main Lightroom drive.

I'm on a MacBook Pro, using Lion and running LightRoom 3.5

[meyerweb]

When you say you back up to another external drive, what and how are you backing up?  The LR catalog backup option backs up only the metadata, not the images themselves.

I'm not a Mac user, so what I'm about to say may not be quite right, but the Mac must have some way to uniquely identify each drive, whether by drive letter or some other method. So, assuming that you're backing up the entire drive, including image files, I think the key is that the catalog points to the location of the images by drive letter/identifier, and your backup drive has a different drive letter/identifier than the prior one. Does the Mac offer a way to change the identifier of your new drive to match what the old one was?

I keep my LightRoom Catalogue, Presets and photographs on an external drive.  I manually back up to another external drive.

I am experiencing an issue that when I launch the catalogue from the back-up external, Lightroom indicates that the photos are missing and indicates the photos are on the first external drive. 

Is there a way to associate the photographs with the catalogue and not the name of the actual external drive? 

I know that I can use the Locate feature, but that is time consuming considering I have over 39,000 photographs.  I now load the Lightroom catalogue using the Control key, but somehow Lightroom keeps looking for the photographs on the first external drive.  I have unmounted it, so I need to find away to remove the drive name from the path of the photographs

What started this is that my main external 500 GB drive is full, so I have been using my 2TB external drive that I use for back ups as my main Lightroom drive.

I'm on a MacBook Pro, using Lion and running LightRoom 3.5

[RFPhotography]

Sounds like you need to get a new hard drive.  Buy another 2TB drive to use as the backup and reassociate your current 2TB drive as the primary. 

[mpost]

Guess I should have added that I manually copy the catalogue and photos to the other drive.  I still do a LR backup and fortunately have not had to use it.
I will check on how the MacOS handles the drive identifier.  I first started using LightRoom on a PC and remembered how I had to manually change the location of the PC drive to the Mac drive.

Of course I could solve the problem by replacing the 500 GB LaCie external drive with a 1TB version, but I was just  trying to understand better how LightRoom's catalogue works

thanks for taking the time to reply

marshall

[RFPhotography]

I'm not a Mac user but even in the Windoze environment there are tools to automate backups.  There must be something in the uber-user friendly Mac world, no?   

[mpost]

Yes there are programs on the Mac that allow you to back up, but I wanted to mix a few folders to straighten things out.  I think the solution as stated will be to get the larger hard drive and keep the back ups as back ups.

One of the nice things about the Mac is that they have a program that is part of the OS called Time Machine which backs up everything every hour.  But I tend to do the photos manually for what ever reason.

appreciate the follow up and suggestions

again thanks