The other day I hadn't noticed that the power lead had dropped out of my laptop when the battery was already virtually empty. It had so little power left so that instead of hibernating, it just died on me. In the middle of a Lightroom session.
The problem came that when I restarted Lightroom was not in a happy state. It had returned to default and had forgotten all my presets, plugins and export settings. Luckily I could drag them back from a backup but it was a bit of a pain. So I was interested to find this Lightroom configuration backup plug-in, which creates a zip file of all your settings and can be setup to do it automatically.
Another feature of it is the ability to zip up your catalogue backups, which if you combined it with my tip on how to automatically delete old backups could really save some disk space.
Showing posts with label Backups. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Backups. Show all posts
Wednesday, 11 January 2012
Monday, 12 April 2010
Deleting old Lightroom backups
Lightroom is a nicely thought out application and one of it's nice thoughts is that it reminds you to backup your Lightroom database on a regular basis. This is a good thing, you should listen to it's advice and make sure you take those backups regularly.
If you always cancel out of the backup dialogue, or worst still have disabled it ,just delete your Lightroom catalogue now. This will save all the hassle of waiting till something goes wrong with your hardware/software/mind. Always, always make sure you have a backup.
The only problem with the Lightroom backup system is that it can start to fill up your hard disk with lots of old copies of your catalogues. It would be nice if there was away to automatically limit it to only keeping 2 months or so worth of backups. Well after a quick bit of fettling I worked out a way to do this.
The instructions below are for windows PCs, if you've got a Mac there is probably some animated icon of Steve jobs you can click on and all your problems will be solved.
1.First identify what directories you are backing up to. These are usually in a folder called Backups inside the directory where your caltalouge lives In my case they are:
D:\Catalogs\Lightroom\Backups
and
D:\Catalogs\Lightroom\Archive\Backups
2. Open Notepad:
3. Paste in the following code:
replace D:\Catalogs\Lightroom\Backups with path to your backups you found in step 1
Repeat for each of the folders you found in step 1.
My final file looks like this:
Note: the -60 at the end means "delet backups older than 60 days" you can edit this to any number of days you like.
3. Save the file as DeleteLRBackups.bat (the .bat bit is very important) in a c:\batch folder (if you don't have one create it).
4. Now all you need to do is schedule this as a task to run whenever you like.
If you always cancel out of the backup dialogue, or worst still have disabled it ,just delete your Lightroom catalogue now. This will save all the hassle of waiting till something goes wrong with your hardware/software/mind. Always, always make sure you have a backup.
The only problem with the Lightroom backup system is that it can start to fill up your hard disk with lots of old copies of your catalogues. It would be nice if there was away to automatically limit it to only keeping 2 months or so worth of backups. Well after a quick bit of fettling I worked out a way to do this.
The instructions below are for windows PCs, if you've got a Mac there is probably some animated icon of Steve jobs you can click on and all your problems will be solved.
1.First identify what directories you are backing up to. These are usually in a folder called Backups inside the directory where your caltalouge lives In my case they are:
D:\Catalogs\Lightroom\Backups
and
D:\Catalogs\Lightroom\Archive\Backups
2. Open Notepad:
- In XP choose Start>Run and type notepad click OK.
- in Vista/Windows 7 just type notepad in the search box & click on the notepad icon
3. Paste in the following code:
forfiles /p "D:\Catalogs\Lightroom\Backups" /c "cmd /c rd @file /s /q" /d -60
replace D:\Catalogs\Lightroom\Backups with path to your backups you found in step 1
Repeat for each of the folders you found in step 1.
My final file looks like this:
forfiles /p "D:\Catalogs\Lightroom\Backups" /c "cmd /c rd @file /s /q" /d -60
forfiles /p "D:\Catalogs\Lightroom\Archive\Backups" /c "cmd /c rd @file /s /q" /d -60
Note: the -60 at the end means "delet backups older than 60 days" you can edit this to any number of days you like.
3. Save the file as DeleteLRBackups.bat (the .bat bit is very important) in a c:\batch folder (if you don't have one create it).
4. Now all you need to do is schedule this as a task to run whenever you like.
Friday, 2 October 2009
Backing up to the Cloud - Got there in the End!
Hopefully long term readers remember my articles on backing up to the cloud:
Backup to the cloud - Part One
Backup to the cloud - Part Two
Backup to the Cloud - Final Thoughts
Well I am sure that none of you care but I just thought I would mention that my image archive backup is now complete and safe in the web:
Safe in the Web
(Click to View Large)
My Image archive was 300gb but I decided to got through it & cull a load of images I didn't want and would never use. I know some people keep everything but I really can't see the point in keeping out of focus shots, test shots, etc.
The cull got it down to 150mb and it has since grown back up to 285gb (sheesh those 5DmkII files are big). So it has take 163 days (I lost 10 due to being away) and has averaged 1.74GB a day. That means the system can cope with around 50GB a month of images, which is easily enough for my needs.
Think we can count that as a success and I can rest easy knowing my images are safe.
Backup to the cloud - Part One
Backup to the cloud - Part Two
Backup to the Cloud - Final Thoughts
Well I am sure that none of you care but I just thought I would mention that my image archive backup is now complete and safe in the web:
Safe in the Web(Click to View Large)
My Image archive was 300gb but I decided to got through it & cull a load of images I didn't want and would never use. I know some people keep everything but I really can't see the point in keeping out of focus shots, test shots, etc.
The cull got it down to 150mb and it has since grown back up to 285gb (sheesh those 5DmkII files are big). So it has take 163 days (I lost 10 due to being away) and has averaged 1.74GB a day. That means the system can cope with around 50GB a month of images, which is easily enough for my needs.
Think we can count that as a success and I can rest easy knowing my images are safe.
Thursday, 27 August 2009
7 Backup Strategies
Now I know I like to bang on about backups from time to time, but that's because backups are a computer users best friend.
I've just come across this article on the PC World site, which gives a great overview of the different options and technologies available to PC users at the moment. Its well worth a look and if you are thinking to yourself "I must do something about backing up", now is the time to do that something!
I've just come across this article on the PC World site, which gives a great overview of the different options and technologies available to PC users at the moment. Its well worth a look and if you are thinking to yourself "I must do something about backing up", now is the time to do that something!
Friday, 15 May 2009
Backup to the Cloud - Final Thoughts
I have had quite a lot of feedback about my articles on backing up to the cloud:
Backup to the cloud - Part One
Backup to the cloud - Part Two
I am glad I introduced the concept to so many people.
Gold Green and Blue
Backup to the cloud - Part One
Backup to the cloud - Part Two
I am glad I introduced the concept to so many people.
Gold Green and BlueThe feed back that I got was that it sounded interesting but it seemed ever so complicated. Sorry that will be me get too technical too quickly. For most people with one PC or mac i really is very simple:
I don't see any point in backing up a load of rubbish that I will never ever use or look at so I have taken the opportunity to have a real cull of images. When I look back it's amazing the amount of old tosh I have had cluttering up my disks. I estimate this should reduce the size of my archive by at least a third.
If you still don't think backing up to the cloud is for you this chart is worth taking a look at, as it gives you an idea of how cloud backup compares against other forms of backup. Though I must stress that they are not exclusive options, the more backups you have...the better.
- Download and install the BackBlaze client
- Create an account
- If you still like it after 15 days..pay for it.
I don't see any point in backing up a load of rubbish that I will never ever use or look at so I have taken the opportunity to have a real cull of images. When I look back it's amazing the amount of old tosh I have had cluttering up my disks. I estimate this should reduce the size of my archive by at least a third.
If you still don't think backing up to the cloud is for you this chart is worth taking a look at, as it gives you an idea of how cloud backup compares against other forms of backup. Though I must stress that they are not exclusive options, the more backups you have...the better.
Wednesday, 22 April 2009
Backup to the Cloud - Part Two
Having decided to use a remote backup solution and what I wanted to backup, the next things to look at were to decide on were how I was going to do the backup and which provider I was going to use.
After some looking around I settled on BackBlaze as my remote backup provider. Unlimited disk space for $50 a year didn't seem unreasonable at all.
To be fair the unlimited storage does have some limitations though. It applies to one machine and any disk drives attached to it - except network drives. This is a slight problem if you have your data spread across four machines and some network drives as I do.
Dark Cloud backup?
I decided the best thing to do was to build a PC specifically to handle backups. As long as this PC held a copy of all the data that I wanted backed up then things should be OK. So I took an old PC I had kicking about (it's a Pentium II - remember them), reformatted all the drives and installed Windows XP. XP seems to run rather well on an old machine like that, its the applications that slow it down.
Next steps were to remove any unnecessary items that had been installed (msn messenger & such like) and disable any services not required to store files & connect to the internet. This was followed by installing a virus scanner and the rather long wait as it downloads all the updates and patches for XP to make sure we were protected from all those nasty threats on the web.
It really dosn't matter if the machine is a little slow anyway as the crucial bottle neck is broadband upload speed. In case you hadn't realised ADSL stands for Asymetric Digital Subscriber Line - The Asymetric bit is critical. Downloads are a hell of a lot faster than any uploads and there doesn't seem to be any real way to improve them.
I ran the BackBlaze Speed test to get an idea of what sort of speed I could expect and then ran the TCP otimizer to squeeze out every last bit of bandwidth I could. I seem to be achieving around 2GB a day so it's not great but it's acceptable. The next step was to install the BackBlaze software and configure it to ignore any stuff I didn't want backed up on the machine (like the windows XP install directory).
The final install was to load and configure All Way Sync to copy over all the critical information I need backed up from all the various machines.
For my initial backup I chose to backup everything except my image archive. The initial backup takes a long time as it has to copy up every file (6 Days in my case), but after that things should be much quicker as it just copies up changes.
I have now started adding my image archive to the backup. At 300GB I guess it will take 150 days to upload 7 years worth of images. I figure that isn't too bad, if it took me 7 years to create that much data, half a year to upload it is pretty good. Good job I am looking on this as a long term project.
Once this initial upload is complete things should work fine as long as I generate an average of less than 2GB of data a day, that's 700GB a year. At the moment I am at nowhere near that sort of volume, so it seems I have a workable solution.
After some looking around I settled on BackBlaze as my remote backup provider. Unlimited disk space for $50 a year didn't seem unreasonable at all.
To be fair the unlimited storage does have some limitations though. It applies to one machine and any disk drives attached to it - except network drives. This is a slight problem if you have your data spread across four machines and some network drives as I do.
Dark Cloud backup?I decided the best thing to do was to build a PC specifically to handle backups. As long as this PC held a copy of all the data that I wanted backed up then things should be OK. So I took an old PC I had kicking about (it's a Pentium II - remember them), reformatted all the drives and installed Windows XP. XP seems to run rather well on an old machine like that, its the applications that slow it down.
Next steps were to remove any unnecessary items that had been installed (msn messenger & such like) and disable any services not required to store files & connect to the internet. This was followed by installing a virus scanner and the rather long wait as it downloads all the updates and patches for XP to make sure we were protected from all those nasty threats on the web.
It really dosn't matter if the machine is a little slow anyway as the crucial bottle neck is broadband upload speed. In case you hadn't realised ADSL stands for Asymetric Digital Subscriber Line - The Asymetric bit is critical. Downloads are a hell of a lot faster than any uploads and there doesn't seem to be any real way to improve them.
I ran the BackBlaze Speed test to get an idea of what sort of speed I could expect and then ran the TCP otimizer to squeeze out every last bit of bandwidth I could. I seem to be achieving around 2GB a day so it's not great but it's acceptable. The next step was to install the BackBlaze software and configure it to ignore any stuff I didn't want backed up on the machine (like the windows XP install directory).
The final install was to load and configure All Way Sync to copy over all the critical information I need backed up from all the various machines.
For my initial backup I chose to backup everything except my image archive. The initial backup takes a long time as it has to copy up every file (6 Days in my case), but after that things should be much quicker as it just copies up changes.
I have now started adding my image archive to the backup. At 300GB I guess it will take 150 days to upload 7 years worth of images. I figure that isn't too bad, if it took me 7 years to create that much data, half a year to upload it is pretty good. Good job I am looking on this as a long term project.
Once this initial upload is complete things should work fine as long as I generate an average of less than 2GB of data a day, that's 700GB a year. At the moment I am at nowhere near that sort of volume, so it seems I have a workable solution.
Monday, 20 April 2009
Backing up to the Cloud - Part One
I might have mentioned it before but I make no apologies for mentioning it again, make sure you have your data backed up. There are loads of interesting and unusual ways that you can lose the information that you need and a good backup strategy is the only way to protect yourself.
Having taken the time to asses my existing backups and possible threats to my data I came to the conclusion that I had no real protection against a total loss event. What's a total loss event? Well in my case I can see some possible events that would fall into that category: flood, fire & theft. A house fire would melt all my hard drives, a flood wouldn't do them much good either and it is possible that some thieving toe rag could break into the house and clear out all originals and backups.
In the Clouds
So how can I protect my data from total loss? Well traditionally the answer is off-site backups. An off-site backup is where you copy your data to disk or tape and then move those devices far enough away from you to ensure they survive a disaster. This is common practice in the business world. Alternatively, we can take advantage of the internet and backup to The Cloud. Having considered a system of swapping portable hard drives in and out of the house, I thought it would be worth trying out the cloud first as its the modern way.
The first decision was to decide what I wanted this backup for. For me this would be a "last resort" backup as I have a layered strategy:
So now we have established the why and the what. In part two we will look at the how.
Having taken the time to asses my existing backups and possible threats to my data I came to the conclusion that I had no real protection against a total loss event. What's a total loss event? Well in my case I can see some possible events that would fall into that category: flood, fire & theft. A house fire would melt all my hard drives, a flood wouldn't do them much good either and it is possible that some thieving toe rag could break into the house and clear out all originals and backups.
In the CloudsSo how can I protect my data from total loss? Well traditionally the answer is off-site backups. An off-site backup is where you copy your data to disk or tape and then move those devices far enough away from you to ensure they survive a disaster. This is common practice in the business world. Alternatively, we can take advantage of the internet and backup to The Cloud. Having considered a system of swapping portable hard drives in and out of the house, I thought it would be worth trying out the cloud first as its the modern way.
The first decision was to decide what I wanted this backup for. For me this would be a "last resort" backup as I have a layered strategy:
- Currently active work on any PC is copied overnight to another PC using Allway Sync. This allows me to recover yesterdays work quite easily should I accidental delete or corrupt a particular file.
- Once a month each machine is imaged to a USB drive, using Acronis True Image. This is to protect against HDD failure and to allow me to recover files that are not on the daily backups i.e. ones I deleted a few weeks ago and suddenly realise I need now.
- Image archive. Once a month I move the previous months photos to my herd of buffalo.
- Cloud backups would add the final layer that allows me to protect myself from total loss and to go back to much older files if I need to.
- Email is a major priority, all sorts of things can be kept in the various folders of an email system: logins to infrequently used systems, licence keys for downloaded software, travel bookings, reservations.
- Documents created in Wod, Excel,etc
- IView Media Pro catalogues, so I can find all my images.
- My Image Archive
- The latest release of Lemon
- A copy of my website including the templates used to generate it.
- Music: I don't think I need to keep a copy of my music as I have it all on CD & 2 hard disks. In event of a total loss I would just have to buy all those CDs again.
- Bookmarks: For some people their web bookmarks are essential but I hardly use bookmarking so there is no need to worry about them.
- Programs: As long as I have the licence keys I should be able to download the latest versions.
So now we have established the why and the what. In part two we will look at the how.
Tuesday, 30 January 2007
Digital Workflow Article (Part2)
So I have finally got round to completing part 2 of my articles documenting my digital workflow.
To be honest this part is a bit messy as very little of it is automated...and that is not a good thing if you ask me. I am hoping that as the year progresses I will move to either Adobe Lightroom or the new version of Capture One as both seem to offer the possibility of a more automated workflow.
The idea of having the workflow as articles is that I can update them as my workflows improve, the ultimate goal being that I only have to make the "Creative" decisions i.e. should this be in B&W ?, how about a crop? etc. The software should automate everything else: file locations, keywording, backups,etc.
Soon I will start work on part 3 which deals with presentation: prints, websites and web galleries. The final part will deal with archiving.
To be honest this part is a bit messy as very little of it is automated...and that is not a good thing if you ask me. I am hoping that as the year progresses I will move to either Adobe Lightroom or the new version of Capture One as both seem to offer the possibility of a more automated workflow.
The idea of having the workflow as articles is that I can update them as my workflows improve, the ultimate goal being that I only have to make the "Creative" decisions i.e. should this be in B&W ?, how about a crop? etc. The software should automate everything else: file locations, keywording, backups,etc.
Soon I will start work on part 3 which deals with presentation: prints, websites and web galleries. The final part will deal with archiving.
Sunday, 7 January 2007
I got me some buffalo!
Over the last few weeks I have been carefully documenting my photographic workflow. As I looked at each part of my process I kept checking that everything is backed up and safe.
Looking at my archive of images for the last 5 years I realised that I was on the verge of running out of disk space as I had room for just a month or twos shots left. I make that time to get me a pair of Buffaloes.
Buffalo LinkStation Pro
The Buffalo Linkstation Pro is a network file-server in a box. I got myself two of the 500GB version which should give me plenty of room for my photos for a few years.
I'm sure many of you think "two 500GB drives - that's a terrabyte" - well actually it's not. It's one 500GB drive with a backup to mirror it, I stopped buying hard disk drives in ones a few years back when I kept getting asked to help people who had lost loads of important documents due to a hard disk crash. Now I always buy drives in pairs so I have a live and a backup, a 120GB internal drive and a 250gb USB drive to back it up for example.
My first impression of these drives is that they are a real quality product and the people at Buffalo have really thought about what you might need from an external drive.
Installation is a breeze:
Configuration of the backup is done through your web browser. I had a little bit of a problem with this and in the end was forced to read the manual that comes on the CD. The trick is to first configure the backup target share as a "Disk Backup" (you will find it under Shared Folders set-up>Shared Folder Support). then go to the primary drive and set-up the backup to this share.
What is really neat about this backup is that the drives do it themselves, even if my PCs are switched off the drives will still back themselves up every night...cool!
I'm currently looking for a good location for the backup drive as I've just realised that it is directly under the cold water tank in the loft. I will try to ensure that both drives are as far away from each other as possible to increase security a little in event of a flood.
A real quality product...I'm impressed.
Looking at my archive of images for the last 5 years I realised that I was on the verge of running out of disk space as I had room for just a month or twos shots left. I make that time to get me a pair of Buffaloes.
Buffalo LinkStation ProThe Buffalo Linkstation Pro is a network file-server in a box. I got myself two of the 500GB version which should give me plenty of room for my photos for a few years.
I'm sure many of you think "two 500GB drives - that's a terrabyte" - well actually it's not. It's one 500GB drive with a backup to mirror it, I stopped buying hard disk drives in ones a few years back when I kept getting asked to help people who had lost loads of important documents due to a hard disk crash. Now I always buy drives in pairs so I have a live and a backup, a 120GB internal drive and a 250gb USB drive to back it up for example.
My first impression of these drives is that they are a real quality product and the people at Buffalo have really thought about what you might need from an external drive.
Installation is a breeze:
- take it out the box
- plug it in to the mains
- plug it in to the network
- Switch it on
- Sorted!
Configuration of the backup is done through your web browser. I had a little bit of a problem with this and in the end was forced to read the manual that comes on the CD. The trick is to first configure the backup target share as a "Disk Backup" (you will find it under Shared Folders set-up>Shared Folder Support). then go to the primary drive and set-up the backup to this share.
What is really neat about this backup is that the drives do it themselves, even if my PCs are switched off the drives will still back themselves up every night...cool!
I'm currently looking for a good location for the backup drive as I've just realised that it is directly under the cold water tank in the loft. I will try to ensure that both drives are as far away from each other as possible to increase security a little in event of a flood.
A real quality product...I'm impressed.
Friday, 24 November 2006
Digital workflow article (Part 1)
Efficient workflow is the key to managing your digital photography. I have just added the first article detailing my digital workflow which deals with the first part of the process.....capture.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)