Catalog question....and thanks for your help in advance!

Question

I have one big catalog with about 6,000 photos in it.
I really need to start working in annual catalogs since all my photography is about my family and what we do together or images within the geography our family travels.
I wish to move all my photos and the current catalog to another drive which will serve as storage and backup as I begin another catalog for images captured in 2010.
Does this make sense or am I missing something. Eventually I will have the internal drive on my computer holding the current catalog and Lightroom itself and a second drive that will hold prior catalogs and be the retrieval source and finally a third drive that will backup both all the files on drives one and two weekly or greater.
Are there errors in my plans that I don't foresee? Also...can I create a new catalog that has all the keywords of the old catalog before any file is added to it?
Thanks...

Answer 1

[email protected] wrote:
> Thanks...but do you guys keep all your images on one hard drive or
> are they separate for protection? How do you guarantee all those
> images are there when the "crash" comes?
I keep my images on an internal drive separate from everything else.
> I am right in thinking that the catalog doesn't really hold the image
> itself, but merely the thumbnail and the last or saved development
> settings? Therefore backig up the catalog doesn't really save the
> image file, correct?
That's correct.
> And how do you handle systematic backups?
A few months ago, I purchased two USB drives (120M each, which is big enough
for my needs, for now) for each of the computers in my house. I labelled
them in pairs (e.g. "RobsComputer-1" and "RobsComputer-2", "Kids-1" and
"Kids-2") and plugged the -1 drive into each machine. Every 6 hours,
SyncBack (http://www.2brightsparks.com/index.html) runs on each machine and
does a full system backup (all drives) to its external drive.
Once a month, I swap the -1 and the -2, and stick the offline one in my
barn, which is a couple of hundred feet from the house.
If a computer fails, I've got a very current backup on the attached external
drive. If someone breaks in and steals a computer, I've got an
at-most-a-month-old backup in the barn. Ditto if the house burns down. If
something horrendous enough happens that the barn is destroyed too, I
imagine I'll have worse problems than missing data and pictures.
I suppose if I were really paranoid, I'd take the offline drive to my office
or a safe deposit box, but as another poster said, that's a real pain in the
neck. An alternative would be to take it to a friend's house or something
like that.
If I ever have some event that I absolutely don't want to lose pictures of,
I manually trigger the backup and swap the drives as soon as it's done.
Rob Freundlich
"Males are biologically driven to hunt giraffes" - Newt Gingrich
"Some folks you don't have to satirize - you just quote 'em" - Tom Paxton