the digital blues - moving files to a larger drive

[lynnb]

I'm sure this has happened to others, but perhaps you can learn from my mistakes. With 2 external drives at near full capacity, I am migrating my photos and Lightroom library to larger drives. I'm doing this within LR so I don't lose my LR development settings, ratings and keywords. It's very time consuming.

My original files were in hierarchical folders from pre-LR days. With LR that's not necessary as I can just use keywords. So folder by folder, I'm moving the files from the old drives to the new, checking that all files are keyworded as I go so I can find them again in the new "one big folder".

Files that are locked won't move (mostly scans from years ago, and I don't know why they came to be locked, perhaps it was a setting in the scanner), nor can I move the photoshop files that were saved with the "compatibility maximised" box unchecked. I had left this box unchecked on advice from Martin Evening's book that mentioned it significantly increased file size. Each of these has to be opened and saved again with compatibility maximised before they can be moved.

In future, I'll remember to keyword everything consistently when I first upload from the memory card via Lightroom. I'll leave the compatibility maximised box checked in photoshop. I won't save files as "locked" if I can help it. And I would never have had this problem in the first place if I'd installed an upgradable RAID array or DROBO.

This is what happens when you try to minimise costs - you end up spending more time on admin and less time taking photos. Lesson learnt!

 

[PatrickONeill]

If you have enough room and have an extra drive bay, I'd export the library directly onto the new drive.

also, tiff files are a good way to store things. even the engineers at adobe prefer a layered tiff over a PSD file. and works the same as a psd, but can be read by anything that can read a tiff image, so it keeps the number of redundant files down to a minimum.

locked files can be because of some bad permissions. if you are on a mac, just open disk utilities and "repair permissions." if that doesn't work, you are going to have to view the information (command + I ) and change the permissions manually for each file.

protip, for everyone: when moving big files, copy and paste is a bad method, use something like chornosync, which verifies the files, minimizing the chance for file corruption.

 

[Archiver]

I use the program Total Commander to copy large numbers of files from one harddrive to another. My current system is to to have four external drives: one for raw, one for exported jpegs, and the two others as backups for the first two.

When a drive becomes full, it will be at a time when larger drives are less expensive, so I buy a bigger drive and copy everything onto the bigger one, and I use Total Commander to do it. I put the old drives away and store them offsite.