Storage questions....

[F8&Bthere]

Ditto what WD said.

FWIW- for some reason I don't like to always have to fire up my external drive. My local internal drive is a decent size and dedicated to multimedia, so what I do is I have two Lightroom master folders, one on my internal C: drive called Current Work, which is usually the last few months of images, and one on my external called Archives, which is everything else. That way I can fire up LR and work on current stuff quickly without "bothering" the external drive. And as WD says all the images stored on your external drive are still in your LR catalog to look at previews, sort into collections, etc, you just can't edit them or view in full resolution unless you turn on the external drive. But as soon as you do turn it on, LR automatically re-links so you can have full functionality.

You probably already know this, but it's important that if you end up moving files around from drive to drive or creating new folders and such that you do it within the LR Library interface, not windows explorer (I guess same thing applies to Mac). It can save some headaches. Just remember that as of LR 2.x you can't move more than one folder at a time within that LR Library module. you can select-all or shift-click individual files, but doesn't work with folders. I found out the hard way when I decided to re-organize a library of thousands of images that were sorted into 100+ folders, each one a day of shooting.

Better to research a bit how others are structuring their libraries, plugins, catalogs, backups, etc, getting some different ideas and logic, deciding what works for you, then doing it right in the first place and sticking to it. I still don't think I have it right.