Storage questions....

[casil403]

Well, if I am understanding your question correctly...
When you initially set up Lightroom you likely chose a master folder location to store your images in. It sounds like that location was a folder somewhere on your 500G external drive. So then I guess every time you import new images, you have LR set to move them from the memory card (if you do it the way I do) to that folder and add them to the LR catalog (database). Any further manipulation of the images and subfolders in that folder on your external hard drive should only be done from within LR. Don't delete, move, or add images directly to the folder through windows explorer, or you'll make the LR gods very unhappy.

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I've been importing photos via Windows import tool...should i be using Lightroom instead? That might be why they are ending up in the My pictures folder on the internal HD?
Should I be using LR to import instead of Win?
Sorry if sounds daft but I am really not good at this sort of thing.

[Greg_Nuspel]

Copy my photos of the card into a folder on one of my internal drives. I then import the photos into lightroom without moving or copying them. This way it just adds them to the database in the catalogue. I then back up my files onto an external drive using EZBackup. These are my safety files that I keep in case of a hard drive failure. I actually have two external drives one is kept at work and each week I bring the one from home to work and exchange them. This way I actually have 3 copies of my images for peace of mind.

[mbrager]

I agree with Greg: redundancy is good. The thought of losing all those beautiful photos you've taken would break our hearts. We should all make sure we back-up regularly. An external hard drive is good, but off site back up is priceless. I speak from the experience of having a hard drive failure that was unrecoverable and losing two years of work.
Mike

[kurtdriver]

I agree with Greg: redundancy is good. The thought of losing all those beautiful photos you've taken would break our hearts. We should all make sure we back-up regularly. An external hard drive is good, but off site back up is priceless. I speak from the experience of having a hard drive failure that was unrecoverable and losing two years of work.
Mike

Not a fate anyone should repeat. DVDs are cheap, these days. Burn, baby burn!

[Greg_Nuspel]

Not a fate anyone should repeat. DVDs are cheap, these days. Burn, baby burn!

Just be careful with DVDs some don't last very long The Life-Span of DVDs
Do Burned CDs Have a Short Life Span? - PCWorld

[Wicked Dark]

Lately I've been using USB drives as back up to the back up. Not everything, mind you, just the cream of the crop - 1 -10 shots per session. An 8gb thumb drive is $20 and will probably go down even more before the $16gb becomes a better deal.

[F8&Bthere]

When you drag and drop files from one drive to another it usually only copies them (unless you use some keyboard shortcut). But when you do the same thing from one folder to another on the same drive it moves the files (does not make copies). At least that's the default on all versions of windows I've used. So I guess you ended up with a bunch of dupes.

Yes backing up is peace of mind, but saving duplicates on your internal drive as a back up of your external drive would be kinda backwards and counterproducive to your other goal which is to not clog up your system drive. For that you might need to burn dvd's or add a 2nd external drive down the road. So those dupes in your My Pictures folder are probably not worth keeping, at least long term.

Regarding how to import images into LR I'll say this- I was surprised to learn from another pro photographer podcast that there is a theory that importing directly from the card is not the best way. The idea is that the way LR ingests and transfers data from another drive or memory card is not 100% trusted, can lead to corrupt data, and there's even at least one Adobe guy that recommends first moving files from your card to your local drive, to a temporary folder, and then do the LR import from there. I don't care though, I'm still going to import from the card until I personally see some reason not to.

When you load a card into a connected or built-in card reader LR should recognize it and when you click import it should list that drive/slot as an option to import from.

[AntZ]

I have been moving my images to an external drive because I am trying not to carry my notebook to and from work everyday, but still want my images available. I exported my images as a catalogue to make sure I had a copy of the files and edits. Then changed the location of the images from notebook hdd to the external one.

[casil403]

What about offsite/online storage like Smugmug? Any good? Advantages? Disadvantages?

[AntZ]

What about offsite/online storage like Smugmug? Any good? Advantages? Disadvantages?

I believe smugmug can handle RAW files, where as the others image based ones cannot.
I use windows sky drive for offline backup. 25GB free. You use your browser or you need a program to allow the drive to show up in windows, but it doesn't show up as a drive letter just a folder. I think the files are limited to 25mb in size, so no large zip files.

There are heaps of other options which you can pay for. Carbonite, mozy, Dropbox... The problem with all of them is your upload speed, hopefully this will become less of a problem as bandwidths increase. To me one of these would be the utopia of backing up.