This is one of the reasons why I will never use proprietary software to catalogue my photos. I have more than 500,000 photos sorted in folders by year, date/event/camera and separate folders for edited photos, and I don't understand why I would need another system. With some of the photos having searchable keywords in their EXIF, finding a photo is mostly easy. 3 copies; an original that I always carry with me on two portable 4TB disks and two backups in different locations that are being maintained using CCC.
I agree Jorgen, very similar situation here, all photo's (and corrosponding xmp's, total ~1,5 TB) is in folders, one copy on my desktop, one copy on an external hard drive stored somewhere else and one copy to an automatic on-line back-up service (which keeps all files until 30 days after I have deleted them from my hard drive).
I only empty/format the SD cards in my cameras when the extrenally stored external hard drive is updated (manually, about once a month).
I've never lost a photo yet and only needed the backup to undo some mistakes by myself, but I religiously keep using this system for the day the hard disk in my desktop crashes.
Still I consider this buggy update a major Adobe screw up for which they should do more than just apologise, not everybody is technically savvy enough to understand the risk of using their apps as the only repository of their photo's, or don't even realise it is the only repository.
There seems to be somewhat of a misunderstanding of LR and LR Mobile in your statements.
With LR on the desktop, your photos are never "in LR" ... They're in the file system, just as your current system has them. You can apply the exact same organizational mechanisms of the file system as you have articulated them, and do backups independently, and view individual files, etc etc, just as you do now while having LR maintain far more information and apply other organizational structure to them.
This is because LR is a database system that considers the sources files as accessible
by reference ... Importing simply means telling LR where they are in the file system. The original image files are always just read, with the sole exception of when you modify the time/date stamp or with the files are container files (like DNG) which are designed to be added to and you explicitly tell LR to update the container contents.
What you would lose if LR dies is any edits that you DIDN'T write to the file system or the previews that LR maintains independent of the original image files for display purposes. This is why whenever I finish rendering photograph, I "export" (write to the file system external to the database) a fully rendered, full resolution version of the finished image as a 16-bit per component TIFF file. So if everything in LR dies, all my files are there exactly where I put them and all my FINISHED work is perfectly safe. Only the unfinished work is lost.
The issue on
LR Mobile and the reason for the losses is that the file system on iOS/iPadOS is a sandboxed, "private-per-application" file system to promote the security of your private information. Someone made the awful mistake of mismanaging that sandboxed, LR file system through an update cycle. It's hard to imagine how such an error could get through even the dumbest, first order QA testing for iOS/iPadOS! It's such an intrinsic, basic part of application development for these devices one ought to write those tests first.
The notion that users should *always always always* back up the archive of original image files to more than one location/device/storage system somehow cannot be overstated in its importance, but the notion that Adobe would officially release an update that cocked this particular thing up is truly crazy.
I have been using LR since 2006 and for hundreds of thousands of files. And have been using a backup system created about that same time. In all this time, through dozens of LR updates, OS updates, hard drive failures, new cpu changes, etc, I have not yet lost a single original image file. The original image files are organized just as I want them in the file system and doubly backed up into two archive volumes. LR presents an image management system with a couple more layers of structure and organization that allows me to find, through name/date/EXIF/IPTC/project/client axes, any particular image I want out of those hundreds of thousands very very quickly. And I can get to those files from both within LR and directly from the file system without even starting LR.
G
