Godfrey,
Out of curiousity, - do you write the changes and meta-information back to
the files that you edit with LR?
If you don't, - the source files don't change, do they?
So, unless you store the source files under the directory (aka folder)
where LR catalog resides, what you are writing about is only relevant to
that directory.
But then, in that directory, you have the LR database itself (a huge file
that changes every time you open LR) and previews that change only when
you get them generated. So, it is only the LR database file(s) for which
your strategy is relevant.
Am I missing something?
If you do have LR set to write the changes into the source files, - I
wonder why? Are you using multiple software packages to edit those files?
Thanks,
Igor
Godfrey DiGiorgi Tue, 02 Dec 2014 10:44:52 -0800
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
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