Lightroom Issue: I am running out of space on the C Drive for Lightroom. What is the best practice for moving the Lightroom system onto a cloud drive?

howardberliner

I am running out of space on the C Drive for Lightroom. What is the best practice for moving the Lightroom system onto a cloud drive?

jerseymike

howardberliner wrote:

I am running out of space on the C Drive for Lightroom. What is the best practice for moving the Lightroom system onto a cloud drive?

Have you tried YouTube?? A lot of videos about Lightroom and other edit software.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

howardberliner wrote:

I am running out of space on the C Drive for Lightroom. What is the best practice for moving the Lightroom system onto a cloud drive?

In my opinion, rethink that option and go with adding an external drive for your photos and use the slower cloud drive as an off site backup only.

If you have lots of images, especially if you shoot raw, use of a cloud drive will be problematic, and you would need to find a service that fools your system into thinking it is just another drive that Lightroom sees as an internal or external drive.

You could switch to Lightroom CC which uses cloud storage at Adobe if you really must.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Dngallagher wrote:

In my opinion, rethink that option and go with adding an external drive for your photos and use the slower cloud drive as an off site backup only.

If you have lots of images, especially if you shoot raw, use of a cloud drive will be problematic, and you would need to find a service that fools your system into thinking it is just another drive that Lightroom sees as an internal or external drive.

You could switch to Lightroom CC which uses cloud storage at Adobe if you really must.

Using the cloud will slow things significantly and using local storage (an external hard drive) will free you from internet dependence.

mizzee Loc: Boston,Ma

Ditto on the external hard drive! They aren’t that expensive and a heck of a lot faster than using the cloud.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

howardberliner wrote:

I am running out of space on the C Drive for Lightroom. What is the best practice for moving the Lightroom system onto a cloud drive?

Best Practice of moving the image files managed by the LR Classic software is to move all those image files an to an attached external Hard Drive, not to a remote location. Pick a size that balances the cost and ease of use. I like the Western Digital (WD) 4TB models. Use your Windows OS to assign a consist drive letter to the new equipment. Copy the highest level folder of pictures from your old drive to the new HD. When the copy is complete, go to the computer OS and rename the old highest level folder like 'Pictures' to 'x-Pictures' on the C:\ drive. This will cause the images to be 'lost' to the LR catalog. Go into LR and find the same highest level 'Pictures' folder inside LR and reassign the folder location to the new WD drive. Use the search function inside LR and search for lost pictures and make sure everything was moved successfully.

howardberliner

Thank you

photosbytw Loc: Blue Ridge Mountains

CHG_CANON wrote:

Best Practice of moving the image files managed by... (show quote)

NOTE-After two external hard drives failed I went to two external hard drives. The 2nd being a backup.......which has proven to be very useful.

ps Keep the back up in another location

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

photosbytw wrote:

NOTE-After two external hard drives failed I went to two external hard drives. The 2nd being a backup.......which has proven to be very useful.

ps Keep the back up in another location

Good point. I have a 'red' primary and 'blue' back-up, both WD 4TB Passports. I keep my images in YYYY-based folders and just copy updates from Red to Blue every few weeks or after significant shoots. One's back-up strategy also is a balance of cost vs effort vs risk of loss.

mborn Loc: Massachusetts

I use an external SSD for my LR Catalog and external HHD for my images

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

CHG_CANON wrote:

Good point. I have a 'red' primary and 'blue' back-up, both WD 4TB Passports. I keep my images in YYYY-based folders and just copy updates from Red to Blue every few weeks or after significant shoots. One's back-up strategy also is a balance of cost vs effort vs risk of loss.

There are a number of automated backup programs out there. I am using CrashPlan. That software will check at regular intervals and copy any changed files to the cloud. It will also do the same thing and save the files in a local disk. You get the best of both worlds that way. If you have to restore something, you have a local disk to restore from, avoiding bandwidth issues. If the local drive fails you have the files in the cloud. The cloud is a backup backup.

The automated backup feature means you don't have to think about backing up locally every so often.

via the lens Loc: Northern California, near Yosemite NP

howardberliner wrote:

I am running out of space on the C Drive for Lightroom. What is the best practice for moving the Lightroom system onto a cloud drive?

I think that before you determine the best practice for this it would be good to really look at all alternatives. I am assuming you are using Lightroom CC for desktop. What I, and many other people, do is use external drives. Some people also use a cloud system as a backup. I have a couple of external drives and I use them for the storage of all images, the backup of all images upon import, the backup of my LR catalog, and the backup of my entire computer system. I do not use a cloud system but this is a good approach for offsite storage in some cases and I do need to look at doing this. Using external drives allows you to add space as needed and you can use LR from multiple external drives. Just my thoughts on the subject and I am far from a "techie" type of person, more "into" the software end of the subject but I did research some best possible approaches before I set things up.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

DirtFarmer wrote:

There are a number of automated backup programs ou... (show quote)

One's back-up strategy also is a balance of cost vs effort vs risk of loss....

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

CHG_CANON wrote:

One's back-up strategy also is a balance of cost vs effort vs risk of loss....

"When it comes to backup you can't be too paranoid"

jm76237

Dngallagher wrote:

In my opinion, rethink that option and go with adding an external drive for your photos and use the slower cloud drive as an off site backup only.

If you have lots of images, especially if you shoot raw, use of a cloud drive will be problematic, and you would need to find a service that fools your system into thinking it is just another drive that Lightroom sees as an internal or external drive.

You could switch to Lightroom CC which uses cloud storage at Adobe if you really must.

Agree - you can buy a 2TB external drive for $60