> I know many people who rely upon Time Machine as their backup system. It > works fine. > > The problem with it is that it is inefficient as a backup system for > photographic and video files if you are actively editing and producing them. > Time Machine is an incremental backup system which does a spot check of the > state of the file system every hour and writes a new copy of everything that > has changed. If you are making small, incremental edits to a lot of large > photographs or video files, it will dutifully backup all the incremental > edits made every hour. Depending upon the software you use and the workflow > methodology of your work, this can rapidly fill up the Time Machine backup > drive with unnecessary incremental copies of the same files that you don't > care about ... You only care about the state of the files as they were when > you started an editing session and again at the end of the editing session > the vast majority of the time. > > There's also the issue that a Time Machine backup is not just "files on > another drive," usually what you want for photographic and video backups for > best access. For efficiency's sake, Time Machine creates a nested series of > "sparse disk images" which incrementally add up to the current contents of a > given file system. You can only retrieve the files by using Time Machine and > restoring them, you should not touch files stored in the internals of the > Time Machine backup manually. > > For these reasons, I set my LR catalog folder and the photography volumes on > my system to be ignored by Time Machine. I use a file synchronizing tool > (ChronoSync by Econsoft) to automate and manage the backup of photo files and > the Lightroom catalog folders. ChronoSync does rule-based file replacement > and source-destination target synchronization, allows combination of many > 'synchronizer' files into a 'container' file that can be started manually or > set to do backups on an automated schedule. You can control precisely what > files in what directories need to be addressed, how to do the > synchronization, and whether or not you want logging and/or notification > reports. The files are stored on the destination system in exactly the same > organization as they were on the source system, so they're directly > accessible in the Finder. And, since it's only running on the schedule or > manually as I determine, and I have logging/notifications turned on, I always > know exactly what's been backed up and when. > > Godfrey > >> On Dec 02, 2014, at 09:24 AM, Eric Weir <[email protected]> wrote: >> > >> Still working on the elements of a system for moving my photo database off >> my computer and for backing up the database and everything else. I imagine >> it’s not a good idea, but not clear about the reasons: On Macs why not rely >> on Time Machine for backing up the photo database? Or maybe it isn’t a bad >> idea. >>
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