Lightroom - backing up question

[Shadowness]

Hi chaps,

I did do a search on this, but I didn't find exactly what I needed to know.

I'm about to buy an external HDD dedicated to backing up my photography (probably a WD 4TB Elements HDD, unless anyone has any recommendations?)

Now.....one way I could back up is to just copy and paste the image folders onto the external HDD (so no involvement with LR, or any software for that matter),
BUT.....if I wanted to work on those images again, I'd have to re-import them and re-edit them all over again.

So my question is, what is the most effective way of having images backed up on a HDD, that I can easily re-import them into LR (with all of the edits, flags etc still active)?

I'm still getting my head around LR catalogs and the best way to use them, especially as I have a travel laptop with LR, edit on that, but then want to finalize everything on my desktop LR.

Do people 'export as a catalog' for backups? So if I went on a trip (for example to Singapore). I would have an imported folder in LR with all the images (and edits, flags etc). I would then export that folder as a catalog to my HDD as a folder called 'Singapore'. Even if I delete that folder (and images) from the desktop PC, I could then use the 'import from catalog' feature to re-import those images from the HDD back into whatever catalog I am using on my desktop, and everything would appear as it was when I initially editing/working on them. Or would it?

I've read many ways of doing this, hence my confusion, so any help is appreciated!

 

[JohnStewart]

I create a new catalogue for each set of images in the same folder as the images themselves. It's then a simple case of copy/paste the whole folder to the external backup drive.

I use a robocopy script to mirror the files from the internal drive to the external, so any I delete later from the master directory are also removed from the backup. It also means that only modified files are copied each time I backup so it's many times faster than copy/paste for folders that already exist and you don't get the Windows nag screen asking which version you want to keep. I'm sure there are more clever backup solutions, but this was free and works just fine.

If you need to restore anything, just copy the folder back from the external disk, and chose Open Catalogue from the menu, navigate to the restored image directory and you are up and running with all your edits and flags intact.

Some people advocate using a single huge catalogue, but I find you very quickly run out of flags, colours, stars etc. And you need to start adding keywords for filtering. Much easier just to have a separate catalogue for each image directory and means if a catalogue ever gets corrupted, it's easy to just create a new one for that set of images and re-edit, rather than having to do every image you have ever worked on which would take days.

 

[Holst1981]

I have one big catalogue and use image tags to search.
Now my catalogue is huge and getting a bit unmanageable.
It is great to be able to search everything very quickly.

I would follow John's advice and use separate catalogues for each event.

You could then add all finished catalogues to master catalogue to allow searching of all your images.

Once my hdd gets full I'll probably switch to the system above.