The way is not clear!
It’s been a day of learning. Here’s what I figured. I’d get me a nice healthy network drive (3 TB!), copy my Lightroom catalogs and images to it, and use it from whatever computer I wanted. Wrong!
Now I remember that Lightroom won’t open a catalog that’s on a network drive. It has to be on your main hard drive, or attached to your computer. I tried and was promptly chastised by LR for attempting to open a catalog on the network. 
In searching the ‘net, I found the same solution over and over: You can either store all of your images on the network drive and your catalogs on your local drive and do it that way OR you can store the catalogs and images on the network drive and copy the catalog when you need to modify it, do your work, and then copy it back.
Well, the second solution doesn’t sound to good to me. Also, there’s the issue of transfer speed, etc. That could be a long process, even with a gigabit network, which will only transfer as fast as the slowest components in the system, usually the hard drives, which top out at about 40 – 60 Mb/second, (mega BITS, not bytes – 8 bits/byte). I don’t relish the thought of copying 350 GB of images to the network drive. That could take days!
Anyway, I know some of you have huge systems and also use LR. Any suggestions would be appreciated. How do you go back and edit use previous catalogs?
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Paul, here’s my method, for what it’s worth — I don’t think it directly applies to your situation.
I use a Mac Pro as my main computer so that gives internal drive options a laptop doesn’t. I have a NAS 4tb (5 disks) hot swappable raid drive I use for back-ups of everything. My photos and LR catalog are both stored on internal hard drives and ALL changes are backed up automatically to this raid drive each night.
I have one LR catalog that holds everything (50000+) images. There’s no loading and unloading catalogs. So far this many images hasn’t been a problem and I’ve read of people with much larger catalogs. I also do LR Catalog backups weekly using LR’s catalog back-up feature.
Earl recently posted..Sidewalk Shadows
Thanks, Earl. Looks like you do the option with all catalogs, or in your case, ‘the’ catalog on your main drive as well as photos. Yes. I don’t have enough storage for that; however, it would be no problem to keep the catalogs on the main drive and let Time Machine do the backups to the network. More stuff to think about. I’m not really excited at the prospect of copying 350 GB of photos. It could take a very, very long time. I’ll probably return this LiveBook as it is painfully slow reading and writing. I’d come out better with another USB drive, maybe 1 TB or so just for Time Machine backups.
Thanks for your input, Earl.
Yeah, the catalog and the photos are both on internal drives but not the same one in my case. Mac Pro’s have four internal hard drive slots. My OS drive is also being backed up by Time Machine to the network drive every 6 hours.
I think that you’ve got it covered, Earl!
I have all of my photos on a single 1TB external hard drive, with the LR catalog file on the internal hard drive on my iMac. My iMac backs up hourly using Time Machine, and every time I back up the external drive – to identical drives using SuperDuper to make incremental backup copies – I first make an additional catalog backup to the external drive. I keep one of the backups at work, and rotate it home on a regular basis when there’s no forecast of bad weather or other natural disaster!
Kinda similar to Earl’s system but with the photos on an external drive and without the Raid stuff.
Tom Dills recently posted..That Comfort Zone Thing
I’m setup much like Tom except I have a MacBook (Not a Pro) where I keep my catalog. My images are stored on an external 1TB drive and backed up to a second external drive. I also backup my catalog to the external drives using LR backup.
Monte Stevens recently posted..Practicing
I’m using Win 7 and all photos are on 2 internal disks and i do back-ups manually. So far, this has worked out pretty well for me.
Ken Bello recently posted..MINI CAMERA
I can understand why LR has that limitation. If it is on a network drive, it could be subject to being opened by two people at the same time or two computers. I thought I read somewhere that it could more easily become corrupted as well. I keep everything on internals, and backup to a NAS.
Mark recently posted..Bullfrog in Duckweed pond
Thanks, all. I decided to go with the simplest approach. I’ve moved my catalogs onto my internal disk and am using a new, 2 TB drive, backed up with Time Machine. The images remain on the NAS and are backed up to a stand-alone 500 GB hard drive. That’s about as far as it’s going.
Paul, it’s good seeing your photos. This is a really nice scene. I wish I was there.