Questions about Lightroom and media backup

[Ron Hunter]

I currently use a single Lightroom 5 catalog for my entire collection of photos and videos. As you know, LR uses a catalog database to hold metadata for all media in the catalog but it doesn't actually contain the media; the catalog and media are separate files and they can reside on different drives.

During a Lynda tut I learned (1) most people only use 1 catalog for all media and (2) to use "File > Export as Catalog" as a means of backing up the catalog and media files at the same time. At first I thought this would be a great way to backup my photos and catalog at the same time on a BluRay disc, but then I realized my videos were also in the catalog and that would never fit on a BR disc.

Currently my LR catalog and all media files reside on a USB3 external HDD. That HDD is backed up daily to another external USB3 HDD using "GoodSync" by Siber Systems.

I'm curious if others on this site also use a single LR catalog for all media or do you use separate catalogs for work, personal, per client, etc?

And today I heard about a video editor whose home was robbed. When the robber took the computer he also took the external hard drives next to the computer. Now the victim has lost ALL of his media because he didn't have an offsite backup. This has made me want to get a 3rd drive for media that I keep offsite. Thoughts?

[Steve Grisetti]

That's one option, Ron. Although online backup may be easier and cheaper. Especially with all of the options out there now.

[Ron Hunter]

Steve, do you think it would be cost-effective for cloud backup even when I have hundreds of GB of video files? I haven't looked into online backup because I presumed it wasn't cost effective for large files, but maybe I'm missing something??

[TreeTopsRanch]

Dropbox charges $10.00 per month for 1TB of storage. That's 1000 GB.
LiveDrive charges $7.00 per month for 1 TB of storage.

[Dave McElderry]

Carbonite is $59.99 per year with unlimited storage space. The main drawback is how long it would take to do the initial backup (weeks or months), and how long to upload new large files as they're created.

[Peru]

One offsite option would be to have copies of external hard drives at a friend's or relative's home.
I own a business and keep my offsite backups at work.

[jackfalbey]

I'm a little obsessive about backups. I use Second Copy (thanks Bobby for the recommendation years ago here on Muvipix!) to make exact duplicates of all my files to 3 external hard drives. 2 stay here at my house and I rotate them with 1 at a friend's house. I also burn everything to Blu-rays (~50GB each) for permanent archives. I used to use Carbonite but the upload time took too long. Cloud backup is a great idea, but with around 2.5 TB of files to back up, it didn't work for me.

[Ron Hunter]

Thanks everyone for your helpful feedback!!

I was considering using Bluray discs as a permanent backup (as "permanent" as anything can be I suppose) but I thought it may be overkill when also using external hard drives. Apparently I'm not the only one who has thought about that.

And thanks for the info on online backup, those numbers are as I expected. I think a more durable and practical solution is to get a 3rd external hard drive for onsite/offsite rotation with the other two, and also backup the files to Bluray.