NM CliQ Magazine March 2016 | Page 77

variety of cloud backup services so pick up the one you prefer. Here are the ones I recommend: • Dropbox: Probably the most famous and widely used one. I use it for my backups but may switch since they are now one of the most expensive ones compared to what all other services offer. You can see in the previous image that I’ve created a folder called “LR Backups” inside of the Drive and all my backups go there. • Google Drive: Since a lot of us live in the Google environment (Gmail, Android, Google Docs, G+, etc..), you might sign up for an extra 100GB with GDrive and store all your backups there. GDrive offers 15GB free when you sign up (you already have a Drive account if you use Gmail). • Copy: This is one of the relative newcomers in the field and they’re doing a great job with competitiv e prices and fast uploads. By having your backup separate from your original catalog location, and synchronized to to cloud, you’ll feel much safer and won’t be afraid of losing all your precious editing. On a side note, I’d like to mention that, as you backup regularly, it’s worth getting into the habit of going back to your backup folder and deleting the older ones. As they stack up, they’ll start taking a lot of space (especially if your photo collection is growing), so go ahead and delete the older ones and keep at least the 2 or 3 most recent backups. So now you’re thinking that once you’ve done this process, all is well and everything is backed up? Wrong! This process above backs up your LR catalog only. What is not backed up yet? • Lightroom settings • Presets • Templates (Web, Print) • Plugins • Previews • All your images Backing up templates settings, presets, plugins and Settings, presets and templates are saved inside the Lightroom folder (where it is installed). Plugins are saved wherever you decided to save them. I recommend creating a “Plugins” folder inside the Lightroom folder and put everything there (so you don’t end up with plugins all over the different drives). Lightroom doesn’t offer a way to backup these folders from inside the software. You’ll have to do it manually. Go to your Lightroom folder, copy the newly created “plugin” folder and the “Lightroom Settings” folder (check inside, it contains presets and templates) and back them up in one of the above mentioned cloud services. You’ll have to remember to do that regularly though. There is another way that is much easier and safer in my opinion. I usually use 2-3 different cloud services: one contains my backups and the other contains… my Lightroom Catalogs. If you scroll back up to the Catalog Settings image, you’ll see that my Lightroom location is in Dropbox. Why? Because every time I use a LR catalog, it syncs automatically in Dropbox. Most cloud services have the option to go through saved file version up to 30 days, so if anything ever happens (like a corrupted catalog or files), I can always check the older file version and recover it. Another advantage of having your catalog saved online is that if you ever format your computer, you can just reinstall a fresh Lightroom and point it to use the catalog in Dropbox and you’ll have all your edits back again! A third advantage is when you work on different computers, your work is constantly synced and up-to-date, all you need to do is unplug your HDD containing your images and plug it to your other computer and the same edits are all applied. Backing up your images As I mentioned before, Lightroom doesn’t back up your images. It just creates a database of previews, which you can work on in a non-destructive way (as in it doesn’t touch your images). Previews are created on-the-go (or during import). Is it important to back them up? In my opinion, no. Don’t even worry about them. They can be recreated at will whenever you want to, so don’t waste time and space backing them up. However, if you’ve saved your catalog in the cloud like I’ve mentioned above, you won’t need to worry anyway since they’re already synced. What about images? Again, I cannot stress enough the importance of having an efficient backup workflow. I usually have all my images backed up on 2 separate external HDDs and all my edited images are also uploaded on my Smugmug website. But having ALL your images and especially RAW files also backed up on the web is essential since an accident can happen (fire, flood, burglary, etc..) and you could lose all your different HDDs altogether. What I recommend is to have a cloud service that automatically backs up your files in the background without you having to do it manually. Here are a few that are well known: •  Crashplan: This is the one I use and strongly recommend. Crashplan, unlike other services below, does not throttle your bandwidth after a certain amount downloaded, and most importantly, they keep all your file versions forever (instead of 30 days like most). • Backblaze • Carbonite • Mozy Keep in mind that your initial backup will take a very long time (mine took 3 months to backup all my essential files and images) but after that, it will keep backing up regularly every day. This solution is important not only for images, but also for all your computer files and documents. You can basically backup your entire computer to the cloud (and you should). NM CliQ Magazine | March 2016 77