I do not make my living from photography, it is merely a hobby, but I have had success with a neat little program called “NTI Shadow”. This is very reasonably priced & can be set up to either copy your files as you create or re-save them immediately (hence the name shadow) or, as I use it, as a conventional back-up software.

It does have a couple of nifty features that not all backup software has, you can choose to keep multiple versions of files as you change them, and after the initial save it only copies new or altered files creating in effect incremental backups. However, it automatically adds them to the original file(s) so you end up with a “Mirror” or “Shadow” copy of your selected files/folders, not an increasing collection of original & incremental backups, this means you only have to look in one place to retrieve any lost files & not multiple backups.

I have mine set up to copy all my documents & images (& a few other directories) to a second hard drive once every day, then copy from that to a USB drive once a week. This suits me fine, but may not satisfy heavy duty commercial users. ( NFI )

Just my $0.02 worth

Admittedly, I’m a P-Shop dolt but, P-shop or not, there is no program I am aware of that allows me to put one image in multiple places wearing multiple disguises without increasing the load on my storage capacity. One of the most frustrating things I encountered pre-digital was trying to place one chrome in two or three stacks at the same time. Lightroom says “sure, why not?” – a virtual genie in a bottle.

Regarding backup of LR catalogs – don’t even think of not doing it!!! I’ve had the “corrupt catalogue” message more than once and the BU was the only thing that saved my day (actually week) to rebuild. Why would you not bother? It’s effortless and a small drop in the pond (ocean?) of memory on your system. If you’re really worried about storage – dump the old backups.

Back to P-shop: I do actually venture there on occasion, and I find that after diddling around in megabyte-land I can open the file in LR and make tiny, simple, lovely, easy adjustments to finish the work for me. It’s a weird concept to you CS boys, but it works to shuttle back and forth between programs to utilize the best of each, and it’s so easy even I can do it.

The rest is gravy after that.

Certainly having off-site backups is key. The main problem with using hard drives is their likelihood of failure increases dramatically the longer they are stored without spinning up. Ideally you need to power them up at least once every 6 months to stop them sticking and failing.

It is a somewhat depressingly complex situation, with no actual, good, painless and affordable solutions out there. Tapes get chewed. CDs/DVDs have terrible shelflife, even when stored carefully. Hard drives will always fail – a matter of when, not if. RAID systems suffer lightning strike or water damage. Off site backups get bit rot.

The main solution is multiple copies, of everything.

Gordon McGregors last blog post..infinite monkeys

When the database runs on a server with multi-user access, that may come true. Until then, I find it hard to see Lightroom as much more than Camera Raw with a cut-down Bridge bolted on. I try out new releases when they appear, and wonder why I bothered. Bridge, of course, is useless for the same reasons, plus it seems to need more resources to run than Photoshop itself.

We use ThumbsPlus as a front end to Photoshop, with MySQL on the fileserver, and 178,000 records in the database is not a big load for it. Also, the database and the image files are completely separate, with all metadata in the files as IPTC, or ACR settings in DNGs, so a total database loss would be only a matter of rescanning the disks. The only risk is losing data from offline CDs and DVDs, and the database is backed up regularly – it’s only 1.74GB. Backing up raw and finished images is a different matter, and I agree with your methods there.

Colin