What's the best way to backup a LARGE iPhoto 9 library

The word 'Presently' means 'soon'. Perhaps you mean currently. Do you have a source for that 90% or are you just making things up?

The title of this thread is

What's the best way to back up a LARGE iPhoto 9 Library

See? I've underlined and used bold and italics so that you'll notice the word Library. One of the problems we have is that you're always talking about something else.

The back ups you suggest mean dataloss and you should have the courtesy to warn people of this.

So, if I understand you, optical media is great because it lasts for up to 100 years and stuff, even if in the real world it's only good for 2 or 3?

That's why I recommend multiple redundant back ups, including off-site.

Thanks Clodo, David, origianally form Montreal

The best solution is to pruchase an excternal hard drive formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) and move your iPhoto library to it -

Moving the iPhoto library is safe and simple - quit iPhoto and drag the iPhoto library intact as a single entity to the external drive - depress the option key and launch iPhoto using the "select library" option to point to the new location on the external drive - fully test it and then trash the old library on the internal drive (test one more time prior to emptying the trash)

And be sure that the External drive is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) (iPhoto does not work with drives with other formats) and that it is always available prior to launching iPhoto

And backup soon and often - having your iPhoto library on an external drive is not a backup and if you are using Time Machine you need to check and be sure that TM is backing up your external drive

If you do not want to always have the EHD connected to use iPhoto you can have a second, smaller library on your MBP and use iPhoto Library Manager - http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/ - to move photos between the two

LN

Great Larry, thanks so much. David

You are welcome

LN

to sum up:

---before doing any serious backup you must read:

" ...BACKUPS, ARCHIVES..." ( by Plotinus Veritas )

( hard drives, etc. )

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6031

---you will then realise that, unless you run THREE EHDs, you still incur the risk of losing everything !

---i'm then suggesting backing up the " extremely-important-to-you " stuff on DVDs, which are recognised by all experts as being the safest, most solid backups

---as said before, external DVD drives are the definitive answer to your ( incorrect ) prophetising of the "disappearing" optical alternative.

But such a poor summation, inaccurate and incomplete.

Always remember:

1. There is no way to back up an iPhoto Library to optical media

2. There is no way to read an iPhoto Library from optical media.

Therefore, trying to back up iPhoto Libraries to optical media means dataloss - 'extremely-important-to you' data is lost in the process.

3. You may be investing in a dying technology. Why do I say this?

• You can no longer buy a Mac with an optical drive. (They are being dropped by other manufacturers too.)
• Apple have removed the ability to burn a library from iPhoto and
• they have removed the ability to read a library from a DVD.

I cannot see how these facts suggest that Apple (and other makers) have a long-term interest in optical media. You need to buy extra equipment - a USB drive. This is exactly how we migrated away from floppy drives. First the drives were dropped from the computers and we used external drives. Can you find an external floppy drive now? Easily? Well that may well be the case in 10 years time. At that point your DVD back up is a bunch of shiny frisbees.

I have no idea why this other person won't tell you these things. It seems a basic courtesy to me that you should warn folks of the consequences of their choices - especially when they include dataloss.

4. If all you want to back up are your photos and metadata then uploading the images to Flickr or SmugMug or a similar website is much less expensive, arguably easier, has the advantage of also being off site - plus you can access the images from any computer in the world. That relationship can also be dynamic, and easy to keep updated.

Having figured out a filing system for your photos on your computer, using optical media means you now have to devise a filing system for these disks because you'll have a lot of them as your library grows - how many disks would I need for 55k photos with an average size of 8MB? How much time to burn those disks?And will you also need a copy off-site?

For an ideal back up system you need a minimum of two external HDs. - a back up and a copy of the back up. You need the second back up because HDs sometimes fail. (Mind you, so do optical disks.) Personally, I use four, two off-site as well as an online back up of the photos. By doing these on external disk rather than optical media, updating of changes is trivial, you can back up all your data - there's no data loss - and recovery time is simply whatever it takes to restore the back up - and that's the worst case scenario, where you you have to recover a whole Library. With optical media you need to create a new library and laboriously import everything from the disks, and even at that you don't get your Albums, books, calendars, Faces, the edit history and so on.

I'm not saying that optical media is a bad choice for back up. I'm simply pointing out that it inevitably means dataloss, it's harder to restore and, given how Apple and other makers are treating it, it may be a dead end.

I don't know why those who advocate so relentlessly for using optical media won't tell you these things. But they sure seem important factors to bear in mind when making your decisions.

terence

1- "dataloss" : the " most-important-data-you-do-NOT-want-to-lose " is ... the photo itself ! AND you still keep MOST of essential info with the DVD backup !

2- you must "choose" that "core" you want to keep safe bearing in mind a DVD holds about 4 GB . If you limit yourself to 12 GB, that's still a lotta stuff.

3- everyone agrees ( even you ) that optical is still the most stable, solid backup technology, and that's why it's simply NOT going to "disappear" soon.

Please go to

http://www.storagenewsletter.com/ and click on "OPTICAL" . See if somebody there sees optical as a dying technology...

Yup, 2 hard drives. I do this myself as well. I use Time Machine on both, and ALWAYS keep one drive OFFSITE (I keep one in my desk at work). Never have all your backups and your computer in the same place at the same time.

1- "dataloss" : the " most-important-data-you-do-NOT-want-to-lose " is ... the photo itself ! AND you still keep MOST of essential info with the DVD backup !

That may well be one of the most astonishing and arrogant things I've read on here, and I'm here a long time.

How dare you decide what is important to me? Who gives you the right to declare what is essential for others?Who do you think you are? The bottom line is data is lost and you don't warn people and that's shameful. If you warn people that the data is lost then well and good. Then people can decide for themselves if the loss is acceptable. You have no right to decide what data is important for other people. That's why you must warn people that data will be lost.

Here's something I've posted on this forum hundreds - if not thousands - of times. It's a troubleshooting step:

Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. (In early versions of Library Manager it's the File -> Rebuild command. In later versions it's under the Library menu.)

This will create an entirely new library. It will then copy (or try to) your photos and all the associated metadata and versions to this new Library, and arrange it as close as it can to what you had in the damaged Library. It does this based on information it finds in the iPhoto sharing mechanism - but that means that things not shared won't be there, so no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your events, albums and keywords, faces and places back.

Because this process creates an entirely new library and leaves your old one untouched, it is non-destructive, and if you're not happy with the results you can simply return to your old one.

Note how I warn people that data will be lost - "so no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance" - and then they can decide if that loss is acceptable or not. To assume you know what data is important to other people is high-handed and arrogant in the extreme.

you must "choose" that "core" you want to keep safe bearing in mind a DVD holds about 4 GB . If you limit yourself to 12 GB, that's still a lotta stuff.

Huh? Really? This back up system is so good that I must choose the core that I want to keep?

And, finally, unless things have changed in the last few hours Storage News does not run Apple.

storage news is what it says it is...the latest news on storage ( backups, archiving, hard drives, companies, etc ).

Why not read a few things there ?

Rather amused by your antics : you know perfectly well i never suggested in any way that anybody but the "user" should make the choice of what to keep and what NOT to keep. All this will be decided when you start rounding up the stuff to put on that ( or these ) DVD (s).

Then, depending on the method you will choose, a lot of related data will be kept along with the photo, and some will be left out, according to ONE'S preferences..!

NO this is not a "backup system"! It's a VITAL part of a backup system !

hard drives having a relatively short "lifespan" and being quite fragile ( especially when running, a "bump" can knock one out ), the best strategy is called the " 3 2 1":

3 backups, 2 off-site, 1 on-site.

Anything on your computer's disk is not considered a back-up.

Be sure to read :

" ...BACKUPS, ARCHIVES..." ( by Plotinus Veritas )

( hard drives, etc. )

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6031

heartily recommended by terence 🙂

I don't bother reading Storage News because it's not relevant. They can announce all the stuff they want but if I don't have an optical drive it's of no importance to me.

So, just tell people that when you suggest optical media that Apple don't use drives in their machines and that they'll need an external drive.

Why not do that?

Then tell people that Apple don't support backing up iPhoto Libraries or reading Libraries from optical media.

Why not do that?

Then tell them that bacj=king up to optical media means dataloss.

Why not do that?

Then let them make up their own minds.

Have you so little respect for other people?

oh c'm'on, terence, just a little reading in "optical" , "storage news" wil convince you that DVDs still have a bright future ! ..C'm'on, do it for me , will ya.!

Yes, i tell people, right here, it would be a good thing to get an external DVD drive if your NEXT computer doesn't have one ( by the way, many new owners of Macs are doing just that, now ).

For the umpftphtdxseenth time, terence, we're NOT backing up iPhoto library, we're backing up our most cherished photos.

P.S. by the way, for those of us who like to transfer our music CDs on our computer...?

I have no interest in the future of DVD. It's not relevant. I'm looking at Apple and other computer manufacturers are doing with DVD drives.

Soon it will be as difficult to find an external DVD drive as it is to find an external floppy drive now. You simply can't understand that and I'm not sure why. But there is lots - and lots and lots - of precedent here.

For the umpftphtdxseenth time, terence, we're NOT backing up iPhoto library, we're backing up our most cherished photos.

See there you go again. "We're" doing no such thing. You may be doing that but that's another example of your arrogance, you deciding for other people again - and you have no right to do that.

Plus, if you're just backing up the photos then online is a less expensive, more convenient and probably safer option.

Who buys CDs anymore? I have two teenagers in this house and no one has bought one of those in years. It's all downloads now.