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Why do we back up so much?
Scott Kelby’s latest post, As Photographers, Are We Backing Up Too Much? touches on a crucial aspect of workflow and storage. In essence, what are you going to do with all those photos that are not Picks or Keepers?
I, like Scott and Terry White, mentioned in the blog post, keep everything, but am forever fighting with diminishing disk space - and this is with 4.5 TB of storage!
My workflow is that anything rated with a star or more in Lightroom is a “Keeper”; so what am I doing with all the zeros? Well at the moment keeping them, but recently my thinking has been aligning with Scott’s, is it worth keeping them?
Every so often I will traverse the zeros and see if there is something I have missed, but perhaps 10% of them might be upgraded so that leaves a big fat 90% clogging up the Catalog.
Perhaps the solution is to Export them all to another catalog, and store that on DVD or Blu-Ray, and delete them from the main Catalog, so keeping the storage requirements at a more manageable level and making your Catalog leaner.
Interesting to hear everyone’s thoughts, both here and on Scott’s blog.
October 11th, 2008 at 13:40:22
Seeing that I’m not a pro, I’m not discarding my livelihood when I delete photos. So I’m not afraid of doing so. But regardless of this, I don’t see the excellent “reject” mentioned here, or by Scott, even though he speaks of deleting the “really bad ones”.
For my part, the most used “flag” is neither stars nor the pick flag, but the reject flag. There’s nothing I hate more then clutter, and my bad photos, the ones I don’t consider giving a star or a pick flag are exactly that; clutter, rubbish, garbage -something to be away and done with.
The good ones; not just the mere keeper’s, but basically the “picks”, they usually end up in a Collection where they are easy to find. And with all the labeling, sorting (and searching) options available in LR, there’s usually no problem finding that “one” shot, it being a photo of the reflection of golden leaves mirrored in a mountain lake a couple of years back, or the photo of my kid on her 412 day smearing that chocolate cake all over.
As for keeping a backup, sure I do. I import my shoot, delete my rejects and then let Time Machine (OS X) work its magic. (I see no need to let the rejects neither take up place on my hard drive (why should they, they are rejects!), nor on my backup media (they are still rejects!)
October 12th, 2008 at 15:33:05
I am assuming that there is a distinction between Rejects and Zeros. My first task is always to weed out the Rejects.
I simple press the Caps Lock key (to auto advance) and go through a shoot. Anything that is a reject gets an X. I review the rejects before deleting, then they are gone - deleted from disk.
The question is whether the Zeros are bad enough to Reject, or worth revisiting. I suppose the answer is if you are ambivalent about them then they should go!
October 13th, 2008 at 14:41:55
I realize I fall in the minority, but I while I really love my Leica M8, I also still use my M4 and M6 regularly. This means I still shoot film, black and white and color slide film. What this gives me is a reasonable ‘hard’ backup.
I have no trouble deleting rejects and non-flagged images as I know that I can rescan it if need be. I guess this is a form of backup, but takes up less space than another hard drive.
I am working through the same issues here with regards to digital. CD’s and DVD’s don’t really have a great lifespan, but they may be good for keeping reject only backups. My current thoughts on a reject workflow include copying the rejects to DVD, deleting them from Lightroom and waiting. Then, if I ever have to access the DVD, I add the file back to the catalog. If I never access the DVD, then one day when it no longer reads I can throw it away with confidence.
Just my thoughts!
November 11th, 2008 at 09:59:42
To be honest anything rated 0 or 1 in my book is either so bad it’s useless or so mundane I could recreate it again within 5 minutes.
One thing I hate is having multiple copies of the same shot a few seconds apart; open them in survey/compare and pick two or three at the most. If you need 100s of shots fractions of seconds apart you won’t be reading this; if you’re reading this you don’t need 100s of shots fractions of seconds apart.