Flower of the day – 20th August 2018

Well all I can say is what a couple of days.  We all don’t think it is going to happen to us, but believe me it does.  HARD DRIVE FAILURE!!!!  Yes I was processing an image in Photoshop when all of a sudden… my external portable hard-drive where I keep my photographs stopped working.

First of all I thought was it the laptop?  No… the drive wouldn’t work on my desktop.  Anyway by chance, we hadn’t been out a lot this year.. and the last time I backed up my drive was in Autumn 2017.  So I didn’t lose many originals.  But I lost all my PSD’s of images I created in Luminar and other Software programs.

Now something I did learn from this… is this.  If you create smart previews of your images.  You can export them again, as full-size DNG photos should your hard-drive crash and you no longer have the originals.  By chance I managed to save some.. but I did lose quite a few images.

So tips from me… to you….

• Back up, Back up, and Back up again.
• Create smart previews of everything in your Lightroom Catalogue.. if by chance you do have a crash.. Lightroom will export the smart preview as a DNG File.
• Make sure you create smart previews of all edits that are imported back into Lightroom.
• Creating smart previews can be done at import… or you can simply go to your Library Module, click on Library → Previews → Build Smart Previews.

And the above image is part of the Flower of the Day hosted by Cee Neuner.