How I Plan to Use Lightroom 4 with Google Drive

Telchak

So Google Drive is finally here with, and as far as I can see has the best prices for cloud storage available at the moment. With all my music backed up to Google Play Music, the only things of significant size that I would really miss with a hard drive failure are my photos. These currently stand at about 80GB, but with an extra gigabyte for every forty photos from my 60D this is a number that will grow quickly. I have thus decided to go for 200GB on Google Drive, and at $10 a month I believe this is a fantastic deal for the kind of redundancy I'll be getting.

So, now I've started planning how I'm going to set this up in a way that will not require constant maintenance and copying of files. What I really want to do is configure it in a way that my Lightroom catalog and all my photos are kept constantly in sync.


The plan...

Basically, I am going to have all my photos and my Lightroom catalog on my main pc, in the Google Drive folder that will always sync with the cloud. Any other computers that I have set up for Drive will only sync a folder I'm going to call "Sync Everywhere" that will be used for general file sharing.

Assuming my research is correct, if I convert all my photos to DNG I will be able to set up Lightroom to save adjustments to the DNG file itself instead of the catalog. I'm hoping this will help make my photos, including adjustments, compatible with future software. Before fully committing to this, I am going to have to do some testing over the weekend to see how it works in practice between my desktop and a laptop.

I know there are concerns being voiced by some people over Google's T&C's, but personally they don't concern me and seem no worse than Skydrive or Dropbox.


The implementation...

...will take a while to be realised. I have 3mb upload speeds, which means it will probably take an absolute minimum of 65 hours to upload everything. I don't feel comfortable leaving my computer on 24/7, so this will probably take a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I will keep updating my progress to let people know how successful it works in implementation in case anybody else had considered something along these lines.

Cameraman

You would need to keep LR Catalog backups (generated via LR) as well (you may well be doing this already).

The reason being, that if your catalog is corrupted for any reason - you don't have a separate backup. Would also help if you deleted or reset something by mistake.

Telchak

Hadn't considered that yet, but more than likely my catalog backup will be kept locally, with the hope my Lightroom catlog on Drive never gets corrupted at the same time as a local hard drive failure Might even just send it to a Dropbox folder to have redundancy on a separate network, depending how big the backup is

Telchak

Right, so I've started testing my implementation before uploading the greater part of 100GB of photos. My plan was to see how Drive handles the syncing uploaded files to a second device, if I already copied these files over locally. Although it isn't really important for me at the moment, it will be important if I were to have a laptop and wanted the same catalogue working off of two computers.





First of all, I copied roughly 700mb of photos into the Google Drive folder on OS X and let it sync. I switched over to my Windows 8 partition and put the same folder into my user folder.





I then ran the Google Drive installer and selected the user folder that I had copied over, in the hope that Google Drive would immediately recognize it as fully synced.





Unfortunately, Google Drive would not install using location that already had files in it, so I had to try a workaround.





I selected a different directory finished the installation, but quit the Drive application before it had a chance to start downloading files. The result was the Dive folder with no files, but with the right folder layout. I copied my other files over to this directory, and then started the sync application again.

For about two seconds I felt really happy s a green tic appeared over the 700MB folder I had copied over, but alas it was replaced by a refresh symbol and a second folder was created with y photos being downloaded.





The repercussions of this experiment for me aren't a big deal, as I don't have a second computer at the moment. If I did want to keep two computers completely in sync though it would involve the second one having to download a massive amount of data, for me about 20% of my monthly limit.

I've read that Dropbox doesn't have this issue that you can copy files locally and it will recognize them, but I haven't tested it yet. I can only imagine that it's also a feature Drive will get eventually. But for anyone hoping to this kind of thing right now, an alternative provider might be best if bandwidth is an issue for you.

Effects

Telchak wrote: »

I don't feel comfortable leaving my computer on 24/7.

Why not?

Telchak

Effects wrote: »

Why not?

Irrational fear of something exploding in my overclocked system and me being blamed for burning the house down Also sounds like a leaf blower, so I cant leave it on while I'm asleep

ThOnda

Haven't I heard that the Google Drive (apart from other well known web-storage services) have the terms and conditions, in which you give them ALL RIGHTS to use and sell what you upload?
It that case, my photos won't get anywhere near that service. It is robbery like facebook, where you give them all rights too.

Telchak

That's more about covering their own arses than actually wanting to use anything uploaded to it (although it is worded badly). There's no motivation for a company like Google to start licensing off people's intellectual property, would make everybody stop buying storage from them. There's also other terms that say your files will only be used in ways that improve the service (I reckon probably advertising based on what you uploaded) and that everything you upload is still yours'. Doesn't really bother me (:

Don't really want this to turn into a thread about Google Drive though (there's plenty already), as something like Dropbox could just as easily be used

ThOnda

I understand, but the T&C are as they are, and there could be plenty of readers here who don't read the T&C at all.
Personally, I don't like it at all. It is not broadcasting of your content, like here on Boards. It is supposed to be your own personal data storage. Unless Sherlock decides to sue Google for storing content that you haven't declared and proved, that you own copyright for it. Simple numpties with power are ruining the service that internet provides.
But back onto the topic, it is still not reliable service, especially when you consider quality of Irish broadband, when the IPs are not telling the truth and you are paying for service you are not getting.

Telchak

ThOnda wrote: »

it is still not reliable service

I agree, it's not on par with Dropbox for example with its' syncing ability. It's literally just out though, and I'm sure can only get better. I realise that it's not for everyone for very obviously reasons though (:

---

I've converted all my CR2 files to DNG's an saved myself about 10% (8GB in my case). I tred to find any downsides of using DNGs, but couldn't. Anybody know any that I should know about before I get much more into the uploading?

pullandbang

Why not just buy a good 1tb external hard drive - only about €70 or so - and back them up to that?

Telchak

I have that too

Part of it is wanting to have something completely separate from my computer, never having to worry about hardware failure or power surge wiping out all my data.

Part of it is also just wanting something to play with

Telchak

So, the kind of catastrophic failure I was paranoid about has happened... unfortunately, while only 50GB of 60GB of my photos have been uploaded

Was using a program in Windows for reading HSF+ (Mac) formatted drives. I had previously used their Mac software for writing to NTFS (Windows) formatted drives and thought it was great. Discovered too late that Paragon HFS has a habit of making Windows repeatedly blue screen, and corrupting every HSF drive attached to the computer :mad:

Three hours remaining with Data Rescue 3 (which will hopefully recover my files and a backup image of my OS drive too). This will teach me not to try lay with multiple operating systems while I haven't got everything fully backed up

Zillah

Convert every drive you own to ExFat and never worry about compatibility issues again. Even Windows XP has an update that lets it use ExFat.

Telchak

Zillah wrote: »

Convert every drive you own to ExFat and never worry about compatibility issues again. Even Windows XP has an update that lets it use ExFat.

Thanks for the advice, for some reason I thought exFAT had a 4GB limit

Promac

Internet hosting packages are a good deal for just storing files "in the cloud". You also get a free website out of it so you can set up your own email and blog and whatever and if you go to a well established (safe) company you'll never have to worry about backups. They typically cost less than the tenner a month for google and there's no T&C's to worry about (as far as IP is concerned).

Telchak

Promac wrote: »

Internet hosting packages are a good deal for just storing files "in the cloud". You also get a free website out of it so you can set up your own email and blog and whatever and if you go to a well established (safe) company you'll never have to worry about backups. They typically cost less than the tenner a month for google and there's no T&C's to worry about (as far as IP is concerned).

ANy terms and conditions I've read for web hosting says they shouldn't be used as a backup, and I've come across stories of people having their data removed by the host because they were using it as such