Apparently all serious photographers use a catalogue so I guess I should find out about catalogues and see what I'm missing.

I've been accumulating tens of thousands of images since 1998 and rarely have a problem finding an image. Why does someone use a catalogue instead of just saving meaningfully named images in meaningfully named folders?

Can cataloged images be accessed without using cataloging software?

Are catalogues limited in how many images they hold? If so, can you have multiple catalogues?

Can a catalogue be copied to a backup disk like any other folder or file?

Are there stand-alone cataloging programs, or are they part of photo editing software? If you catalogue your photos in one system can you easily convert them to a different system.

Just a comment here in cloud backup choice. Lots of reputable large providers out there such as Apple, Amazon, Google etc. There are other medium size providers of the service such as Backblaze that I use for a reasonable fee of about $50 per year for unlimited storage (I have 3+Tb at present).

The thing that sold me was the recovery service they provide. For a refundable deposit, they will provide you with a copy of your files via the mail on an external hard drive which would do the restore on your new drive at several orders of magnitude less time. It took me 21 days to upload my files over the internet when I first started using the service. If you are using an internet based recovery, consider how long it would take to restore your files.

I have an iMac and back up the computer drive with Time Machine on an external drive. My media files are stored on two synchronized external drives. Backblaze provides a backup of the media files. Therefore I have two copies at home and one external.

Aside from the mostly excellent advice you've already received here, may I suggest that you turn on "automatically write metadata changes into xmp" in Lightroom's Edit->Catalog Settings->Metadata tab. This will create a tiny "sidecar" file that has the same filename as your image file with an ".xmp" extension. This file contains all of your metadata and represents a snapshot of the changes. So even if you for some reason lose your catalog to file corruption or accidental deletion, you won't lose your edits.

Easy peasy! You need a good external hard drive. I buy HGST Ultrastar drives - renewed - from Amazon. That's an enterprise drive, designed for 24/7 use. I buy an external enclosure for it and connect it to my desktop. Actually I have two of them in a box for backup, with a similar drive inside the computer. I've been using them for years. When it comes to backup, you need at least two.

https://smile.amazon.com/HGST-Ultrastar-HUS724040ALE641-Enterprise-Refurbished/dp/B078WJSG4J/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=hgst&qid=1610025674&sr=8-6

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My 5 cents is that cloud backup is an important tool for your backup strategy. Cloud providers do not go out of business frequently, and even if they did they give you notice ahead of time, but even if they don’t, cloud backup should not be your primary backup system. Local storage should be primary and cloud storage should be secondary.

Cloud storage has bandwidth issues so it may take considerable time to restore a large group of files. But disks do fail and local disasters do occur and these days even regional disasters occur. Cloud storage distributes your data over very large areas to avoid local and even regional problems. And the storage media are maintained by professionals to mitigate aging failures. So cloud storage is safer than local storage but less convenient.

Hi JDM,

Yes, you have some real exposure (no pun intended) with your current setup.

Time Machine by default does not back up external drives. It appears from your write up that you have two (2) WD 2TB external drives. One you use for backup to Time Machine, the other to hold your image files?

Most likely, your Lightroom catalog is on your MacBook and getting backed up to the external drive you are using with Time Machine. If you've truly forced it over onto the external drive, that's fine. In that case, I'd look into insuring that the automatic backups of LR catalog are done to your MacBook.

Your big exposure is that all your images (and maybe LR catalog) are on an external device that could fail, be lost, damaged, etc and if so - everything is gone in terms of your photos. The worst case scenario for most of us!

Amazon Prime does allow you "unlimited" storage of photos, if your format meets requirements - see: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GGU2SU8Y22DZYRMQ Note that videos are not unlimited. You'll need to at minimum get the Amazon Photos app for your Mac and set it up to backup your external drive. https://www.amazon.com/b/?_encoding=UTF8&%2AVersion%2A=1&%2Aentries%2A=0&node=16409408011

Disclaimer: This is not something I currently do, so I can't guarantee results (but seems like a good no cost option to investigate based on what you wrote). I used to use Amazon Drive with a tool called GoodSync to put my images in the cloud as one of my backups, but Amazon changed things such that the tool stopped working so I went another direction...

Hope this helps!

Simple. In addition to your local backup with Time machine, you need an off-site disaster recovery copy of your data (what happens if a power surge or lightning strike or fire of flood takes out both external drives, or malware/ransomeware infects one and is propagated to the other?). The best solution to that is a cloud backup service from a MAJOR provider such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Apple. Choose any one that you prefer, but since you’re on an Apple platform, ICloud is the natural choice. It’s super easy to set up, automatic once configured and robust. Personally, I use Amazon S3, which is by far the largest cloud provider (large is good for a number of reasons) and 3rd part backup SW to automatically and periodically backup to S3, but it’s a bit more complex to set up and administer than ICloud (which I use for my IPad and IPhones).