Non Volatile Storage?

[jtmiller]

My daughter's library of images continues to grow as likely most do. She's now at nearly 3T bytes which we keep on a data drive separate from the C: (boot) drive. This allows me to replace the data drive with a larger one without dealing with reinstalling windows if everything was contained on C:.

However we discovered that some of her imports due to lack of attention to detail were ending up on the desktop in "temporary" folders that often were not so temporary. The result is that the C: drive on occasion would get dangerously close full which can mean OS panics or very slow operation.

So in an effort to prevent that I used the utility provided with Win10 to move all of her user space to also reside on E: (the data drive.)

Unfortunately that hasn't really worked out well for a variety of reasons.

So I'm looking at moving "everything" back to the C: drive.

One option I'm exploring is archiving photos/videos which is over 2 years old to a read-only store which I'd make a couple of safe copies of.

This would eliminate the need to put that old material onto the C: drive and also make it unnecessary to put it into the backup path for overnight backups or BackBlaze offline storage.

We'd keep at least one copy of the archives in a safe off site location in case something happened to the active non-volatile store. I'd periodically create new archives as the need arose to keep C: at a reasonable percentage of capacity.

It would also make possible the use of an SSD for the C: drive as capacities are now approaching 4T.

Obviously she uses some of that old material for current work and as she reads it and incorporates it it needs to be written back to an active writeable store.

Anyone else doing this and what problems does LR have when encountering a ready only store? Can virtual copies span different drives? Other issues?

Thanks

Jim Miller

[Alan Goldhammer]

You don't provide any specifications for the C: drive but it sounds as though the PC has a standard hard drive rather than an SSD.  There should be an easy way to move the photos from the C: drive to your data drive.  I think this has to be done within LR as the catalog will have to be updated to the new location.  If you do this within Windows LR won't know where the images are.  By all means you should get an SSD for the boot driver.  Once you get the current system drive cleaned up you should be able clone the current OS to a new SSD using any of a number of good clone software solutions.  Excellent SSDs from Samsung or Sandisk are ridiculously inexpensive and will speed up your system boot time and program loading.  Data drives should always be separate from system drives.  Depending on the PC case layout you can have redundant data drives or even set up RAID.