Drive failing - LightRoom library in danger

[maflynn]

Talk about timing and bad luck, 3/4 the way through my install of Mountain Lion on an external drive, it died. The install crashed, the the drive would not mount to my MBP by way of FireWire, I tried disconnecting it there, (powering it down of course) and connecting it to my desktop through eSATA.

Nothing would mount, this external drive is one of a cloned image of my internal drive but I also have it partitioned to hold my Lightroom library. I also back up my LightRoom library to the NAS as I don't want my images stored in on a single drive.

I was less concerned about the failed ML install then rebuilding my library from the NAS backup. Thankfully after a praying and leaving it powered down or a while, I turned it back on and the it mounted.

I'm in the process of refreshing my LightRoom backup

The moral of the story - make sure you don't rely on a single back up method and make sure its current. I was sweating bullets because the backed up version is a bit old and while I had the images backed up elsewhere, it would have taken some work to rebuild the library.

All this talk lately (mostly by me) of Aperture and LightRoom has me thinking about Aperture because I think its easier to manage separate Aperture libraries then doing this in LightRoom.

 

[ixodes]

I'm glad to hear you made it out OK.

My first priority is the backup routine I use. Besides using a nice Synology NAS, I make three copies. One resides off site, the other two remain at home in case one fails. It's well worth the investment in media.

 

[maflynn]

I have a couple of external drives, one as my main external drive that holds my Carbon Copy Cloned image, but as I mentioned, my LR library is so big, its too big for my internal drive so use that drive.

Luckily I backed up the library last month. I also have a portable drive that I keep offsite, which is all well and good except right now its, well offsite

I'd have to wait until Tuesday when I get back into the office to use that back up, but thankfully I did in fact dodge the bullet. I'm totally rethinking how I keep my library and its back up strategy. A ginormous library is not the best idea and I think I got lazy by adding year after year to my catalog without looking at the big picture. This type of thing, could have been a bit more painful but I'm taking the lesson to heart to tighten my strategy up

 

[driftless]

I am glad that it worked out for you. I am pretty anal with backups including CrashPlan for online redundant back up two backups on site. TM/TC and my external is a G-Safe RAID 1. I am not familiar with Lightroom but I really like Aperture's ability to create multiple libraries.