How to make lightroom travel

Recently I’ve started to want more portability in the way that I work photographically and that meant that I needed Lightroom to move seamlessly between my desktop and my laptop. This proved to be move of a challenge then I thought, it wasn’t that I couldn’t make it work, rather that there were trade offs to making it work. It seemed most solutions were less them optimal but I’ll cover them all here and you tell you what I ended up doing.
###Requirements –
* Fast
* Whole Library on both computers
* Good Backup Solution
* Easy to setup
* Easy to migrate

###Solutions
###In the Cloud –
Both machines to date have enough hard drive space to have the library in both spots so I thought about using services like Dropbox and ZumoDrive do the work of syncing my library and lightroom database on both computers and in the cloud. For those of you that don’t know how these services work it’s pretty simple, you store everything on you computer like you do today, but you have to move your files to a special directory. Once inside this directory you can interact with them like you would any other file on your computer, at the same time the services are syncing and storing all you data changes included on their servers. When you turn your other computer on it automatically downloads the files and essentially has a local copy as well, this way both computers have the same files and the server has a copy as well.
####The Good –
* Backups were automatic and in my situation I had three copies which was great. (You’ll still want to back up your lightroom DB separately in case it becomes corrupt.)
* Once files were in both locations editing was lightning fast.
####The Bad -
* Syncing my files takes a long long time for all uploads. Computers had to stay on for hours after I was done editing to sync.
* Monthly fees are high for large amounts of storage.
* Migration to syncing folders could be a pain.
###Primary Desktop / Temporary Laptop
In this setup you keep some of the files that you are working on or files that you just shot on the computer your closest to. If that happens to be the laptop this will be just a temporary step for your files. You can do all your editing and color corrections to your images like you normally would without much worry. But once you get back to the house you will have to export the whole Collection you working on and then import that collection on the desktop machine.
####The Good -
* You have what you need
* Speed is great
* No migration from current setup needed
####The Bad -
* Unless you at the desktop you don’t have all your catalog of images
* You have to manually move the files, more manual steps the more room for error.
* Limited backup opportunities when running on the laptop
###External Hard Drive – (Solution I choose)
In this setup you buy a hard drive that will store your images and your lightroom database. This way when you move to a new computer you just plug in the hard drive boot up lightroom and open your database. It’s that simple the files are all there and you don’t miss a beat. The only problem with this setup is that your on an external HD, it’s not as fast as if you have it internally but it does seem to be the best option available for the on the go photographer. You need to be very aware of a one main thing however, you need to make sure you have a good backup regiment in place, hard drives fail, are stolen and are lost and this happens more frequently with external drives then anything else, so don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
####The Good -
* You have all your files with you all the time
* Not much migration work
* It just works, on both computers no waiting for downloads.
####The Bad -
* Depending on the connection it can be slow
* External drives break, are lost or stolen
* You have to carry around an external drive
* If you loose it, your images could wind up with someone else

So I ended up with the last option, it just seemed the easiest for me today and gave me the most flexible solution for the way I work. I will tell you though that with faster speed internet it will become harder and harder to not use the cloud solutions. The time will come when you will store your images on a server somewhere and download/upload them on demand with ease. I’ll be coming out with a description of my backup process soon, make sure you keep your eyes out for that as loosing your images is a horrible horrible thing.

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Tagged as: backing up lightroom, computers, lightroom, lightroom backups, local backup, online backup, picture backups, picture loss, picture storage, portability, travel