Hello and welcome to the joint venture of Eagle-Eye Editing and Seymour Digital Consulting. It’s a venture infused by the great harmony of the written word and the visual text. It’s also great when childhood bears good fruit; I am grateful to St. Andrew’s School for my connection to Andrew Seymour and for so many other good people and experiences. It was at St. Andrew’s where I first caught two serious viruses that have shaped my life forever — the Poetry Virus and the Editing Virus. They are formidable bugs, but entirely manageable and I expect they will produce even more good in the near future. So — I am happy to be here, happy to be the House Editor and happy to have another place to kick off my shoes. Please stick around for new posts about me, my editing business, and my work here with Andrew. Thanks for your time!
It is always a pain to move to a new computer because there are so many files and settings that need to be redone for the user to really get productive again.
With this idea in mind I offer the following tips and advice in regards to moving an Adobe Lightroom User from one machine to another.
This guide is geared towards people who are technically proficient on the Windows operating system, but should be able to serve as a guide to those working in a Macintosh environment.
If you have any other ideas or tips please feel free to send them my way!
Transferring the Data
As any User of Lightroom knows, the Catalog and Image files are the heart of your work and business, and if you are moving to a new machine, you need to consider what to do with them as you move forward.
On the “C:” drive of Old Machine –
There are several of options available to you, if your original catalogs and Images are still on the main “c:\” hard drive of your old machine.
Transfer files across the Network
If both machines are still attached to a network, you can easily transfer the catalogs across, but that is going to take time, and chew up various network resources.
Remember, depending on the number of Images you have, your catalog directory could easily reach several gigabytes worth of data,in my case: Catalog: 12.7 GBs & Images: 261 GBs
Remove the old hard drive –
If you remove the hard drive, you have two basic options, but before you begin, backup your files on the old machine in your normal manner.
Install in new computer –
By simply taking the hard drive out of the old machine, and installing it into your new machine, is most certainly the easiest of the options, and also gives you a second HD spindle when dealing with I/O operations in Lightroom.
But before you remove the hard drive, be sure to check the compatibility of data interfaces on your new machine – Can the new machine deal with the older IDE interface?
An example I can give, is my new machines, that is based on the Asus Z87-Pro motherboard, which does not have any IDE connections.
Also keep in mind, that if you connect the old “C:” drive, and it wants to reinitialize for whatever reason, and you have not backed up your data…
External case –
This is another good alternative, and does give you the flexibility to move to different environments with little issue, and also gives you the additional spindle speed during I/O, but is subject to the port speed when you plug-in, assuming that the chipset on the external drive is the faster of the two.
Backups
There are three critical areas that need to be transferred to your new machine for it to work in a fashion that you are used to: Images, Catalogs and Preferences.
Images –
Do I really need to say more?
Catalogs –
As mentioned earlier, catalogs can easily reach several gigabytes worth of data, but does all that data need to be transferred to the new computer?
Again Users of Lightroom know, and unless they have change the default settings, the program will prompt you to do backups, which are located in a sub-directory of the main catalog directory.
c:\My.Adobe.Lightroom.Catalog\Backups\
By simply looking into the backup directory, one could easily save time and the amount of data that needs to be transferred, by simply cleaning out old unnecessary files, but this is completely user based.
Just check to see which “Date – Time” named directories really need to be moved.
Preferences –
Since this is most likely a new software install, none of your preferences will be in place, so where are those files located?
Like all other User preferences, they are stored in the operating system’s Users profile directory, that is hidden through the normal interface, that can be easily accessed with a little forethought.
Once installed in the new directories, Lightroom should have no issue accessing the “.lrtemplate” files. (BTW – If you really want to be geeky, you can open up these files in a text editor and play with them to your heart’s content)
Conclusion
When I moved to my new machine, I used a combination of techniques described above.
On my old machine, the Lightroom catalogs and images were already located on an internal secondary SATA hard drive, so I just removed the old hard drive, and installed it into the new machine.
From there, I copied the images and catalogs (approx 275 GBs) to the root directory of my new machine, creating a new backup of the files.
Even across the SATA III bus, this still took several hours, and I could smell hard drive smoke. (just kidding!)
When I got to my preferences, I connected to my old machine across the network and simply copied the files into the associated directories.
From there, I reconnected the Lightroom catalogs to the local main image directory, now located on the root of my main “c:\” drive.
Finally, I rewrote my old robocopy script to include the additional external hard drive, that I added for redundancy in my backup solution.
Some may argue, that having all my data on the “c:\” will produce bottlenecks, while I would agree in theory, I also have to wonder with my usage of Intel’s RST technology, reduces this as an issue.
The last time that I bought a new computer, was back in late 2003, just before my daughter was born.
I remember say to my wife at the time, I had to purchase the computer because there was no telling the next time that I would be able to purchase a new one.
This time, instead of paying extra for a mainstream computer, I decided to go to a local computer builder, and have a custom unit built for me.
I ended up with a Pentium 4 on an Intel motherboard, 4GBs RAM and a 100GB HD for around $1000.
At the time, it was a very speedy machine, but after many years of service, and countless upgrades, the machine started to show its age when trying to run Windows XP, Office 2007 and Photoshop CS3.
So the hunt started for an upgrade, and I was able to finally scavenge a base Intel Core 2 6400 box, which I am still using to write this entry.
My biggest issue with this current machine, is that I am running into some compatibility issues with Camera Raw 7 after upgrading to Lightroom 5 and trying to move files into Photoshop CS5.
There is also the occasion, when working on larger 1+GB TIFF/PSD files, I simply run out of memory.
Then, about 2 weeks ago, after a tough budget negotiation, I was given the green light for a new machine!
Yeah!
Now the question was what to get!
I knew what I wanted a machine that could run Photoshop & Lightroom as the main applications, which meant as much CPU and RAM that I could get!
Like any computer geek, I fantasy configured systems on the major computer websites, and knew that they were way overpriced for what I wanted.
I wanted a custom-built machine, but how? Another Local vendor? or via the Internet…
Or myself, which I had never done before, even though I have fixed hundred of computers over the years!
I started to look at several ‘You Built It’ websites to get a very rough idea of price and configuration, and was quickly overwhelmed with the various configuration options!
Even for a seasoned computer person, the various chip sets and sockets available made my head spin! I spent countless hours reading the forums on Tom’s Hardware so that I could make as intelligent decisions as possible!
At some point, I came to the realization, that I was going to be building this machine myself, and I started to venture into YouTube land to learn more about the basics of my new DYI project.
Finally, after many hours of research and internal debate, I finally placed my order:
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been slowly consolidating Hard Drive space within my home-office network.
Because of my background as an backup administrator, I am especially concerned and focused on having redundant copies of data, just in case.
Murphy would be proud…
With that being said, I looked at my various existing 100GB-250GB internal and external hard drives that were sprawled all over the place, and bought a couple of TB hard drives.
Then the fun part, looking at the life cycle of the house data.
There is current local stuff, the Live Data for the house, and then the Secondary Backup.
Next was writing the various robocopy scripts, and making sure I use /e and /mir correctly…
Several more days of data transfer, I finally think I have ALL the data in a nice consolidated fashion!
For the first time in 5+ years, I have everything on one Hard Drive!
Yeah!
But now, as I now am analyzing the capacity of the Live Data drive, I find myself evaluating the situation.
Is my new Half-Full or Half-Empty?
In my 30 plus years of IT, very rarely, have I heard of a hard drive referred to as Half-Empty.
Seems that the when we talk about technology and storage, we tend to be optimistic!
When was the last time your thumb drive Half-Empty? or that CD/DVD that you just burned… Half-Empty?
A friend of mine, was recently having some trouble finding a wireless signal at an airport, and asked what tools were available for his Vista laptop.
Since he travels frequently, I suggested that the next time he had real Ethernet connection to download NetStumbler, to help him locate wireless Access Points (APs).
He did, but was unable to get it to work on his Vista machine.
At the time, NetStumbler had always enjoyed a good reputation for be a great free utility, and a ‘Must have application’ for any techies involved with wireless networking, so I was a little surprised to hear there were issues.
Wanting to help my friend out, and felling bad about giving him a poor recommendation, I did some searching, and found MetaGeek’s inSSIDer.
inSSIDer is a free Open Source software utility, that also supports an array of additional paid products that could be an inexpensive alternative to commercial products such as Fluke Networks’ AirMagnet.
After inSSIDer installed and launched, the first thing that one notices, especially coming from NetStumbler environment, is that the graphs are in color, which is invaluable when trying to figure out multiple sources of signals.
This is not to say that color is the best part of inSSIDer, but it also uses the native Wi-Fi API to group ‘clients’ by MAC Address, SSID, Channel, RSSI as well as “Time Last Seen”. Since inSSIDer also supports GPS devices, this can very extremely valuable when mapping a wireless network environment.
Bottom line –
If you are looking for a very useful wireless network discovery tool that is free, then I would suggest that you look no further then inSSIDer.
