keeping track of Backed up images

[gerryrobinson]

This has helped me alot so thought I'd pass it along.
(sorry if this sounds a bit long winded)
I use external drives and DVD copies to backup my photo files and I've been trying to figure an easy way to keep track of which photo is on what DVD, and to help me know which images need to be burned.Basically my work flow is to import to my main Lightroom catalog and backup to an external drive. After the import is finished I use Bridge to backup the newly imported photos to a second external drive.Next I'll select a group of files,send them to a publish collection to export to a hard drive as DNGs with imbeded raw files and burn these files onto DVDs as additional backups.
After I burn the photos to a DVD I'll select all of the photos I burned  enter the DVD title in the Sublocation box of the Metadata Panel then save the metadata for the group. this let me keep a record of which DVD the photos are on by storing the DVD title in the files metadata.
 What I came across is I can set the Sublocation as part of the Header information that is displayed when you use Expanded Cells and have " show header with labels" checked. I selected Sublocation, now when I'm in the Library module, if a photo has a DVD title stored in the Sublocation metadata, the DVD title shows up as part of the preview. Now all I have to do is look at the preview to know which DVD has the image I might need.To go along with this I set up a Smart collection to help track images that need to be put on DVDs by having it sort by file type and  no DVD title. So far it seems to be working well and it is really nice just to look at any preview and know where I put the backup files and which files haven't been put on disks yet.
Hope this is helpful
Gerry Robinson
http://www.gerryrobinson.com

[VidJa]

thanks for sharing.
I've replaced 'DVD' with a path to my NAS share. The NAS itself is backed up to a tapedrive at work overnight.

[Wayne Fox]

Just curious as to the choice of DVD's for backing up.  Most have moved away from them for many reasons, but the primary reason is their lack of longevity and unreliability long term.  While there are some "archival" cd's that may hold up, most DVD's are rated at 30 years and I've seen them fail in as few as 5 years.  Not criticizing your overall concept, intriguing thought process.

Not that there is a good solution, as hard drives have issues, cloud storage is nearly impossible to use because of the time it takes to upload the information.

Personally I'm looking very hard into and testing SSD drives as possible long term storage.  Since each drive will probably only be written to one time, there is little chance of the drive causing corruption, and because of the nature of the way the data is recorded onto the drive, I'm not sure there is any thing that can degrade the data over long periods of times.  A little pricey, but I only keep the finished stuff on it, the rest is backed up through a 3 tiered series of raid 5 devices, one which is stored at a different location.

[stever]

at present i am not confident that SSDs are a reliable choice for long term storage.  not sure that failure modes are understood well enough, and when they do fail the failures are more catasrophic than magnetic drives