jbmauser Loc: Roanoke, VA

My thinking is to move the entire catalog and image file onto a USB "book" type drive and edit on my laptop and unplug and move it to my desktop for further editing, Printing and back up to a storage drive in the desktop. Will that work and will it be very slow for editing. I know the Catalog is not available to be on a network but I was thinking of an old fashion "sneaker net"

Cdouthitt Loc: Traverse City, MI

I store my LR library on an external. Have had 0 issues for the past year since I started doing this.

Brasspounder001 Loc: Erewhon

I have an internal HD plus 2 external USB drives for redundancy. So far the external drives have been reliable. I'm considering getting a hard drive dock which uses a SATA port as I think the thing that most often fails in a hard drive is the SATA interface. Hard drives are pretty reliable these days but they do hiccup from time to time. Digital images are great and convenient but how do you plan on keeping them safely for your kids and grandkids?

brucewells Loc: Central Kentucky

Certainly, this will work, but be aware that the external drive should be the same drive letter on both PCs. Otherwise, LR will have difficulty finding the catalog file.

If the drive and ports are USB 3.0, you should notice very little latency, if any.

Brasspounder001 Loc: Erewhon

I might add that I use a Linux computer. Linux can handle almost any file system and is happy with FAT32, NTFS or anything else you throw at it. As for hard drive naming assignments, it simply names them starting with HD0, HD1 ... The use of a good journalling file system as EXT3 or EXT4 reduces the chance of file loss on the drive. Another option is to use archival quality optical disks to store priceless images. And you can also store files in online servers, even your webmail account.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Keep the catalog on the external drive along with the images. Unless you have USB 3/3.1 or Thunderbolt 2 it will be pretty slow, but you can connect the drive to either computer. When you open the catalog on the laptop after using the desktop and vice versa, you will need to re-acquaint LR with the correct drive letter if it changes from one machine to the other.

One thing needs to be mentioned. Relying on one of those cheap, multi-terabyte drives for your images would probably keep me up at night. These things are notoriously unreliable. The better way to do this is to get a Hitachi Ultrastar or a Western Digital Black or RE. These drives are popular among gamers for their reliability and ruggedness, and they have 5 yr warranties. You can get an enclosure for around $25 and a fan-cooled one for around $40. This is going to cost more, but it will be more reliable than the Book, Passport and other iterations of cheap consumer drives.

Alternately, and even better, would be an SSD external drive - but it would be more expensive.

I would get two, not one drive, btw - if your images are important to you - and mirror one to the other.

kbatschke Loc: Chicagoland-west

Phil Steele has a free video regarding using LR on two computers. He outlines a few different option/alternatives. Can be found here. You may have to supply email address to get access but he has a lot of very well-done video tutorials that are free and also has some he sells but will not fill your in-box with daily junk.

https://steeletraining.com/tutorials/computers/lightroom.html