Devlab

I’ve recently run into a bit of a pickle; My iPhoto library has become gigantic because of my photography hobby (I shoot everything in RAW because I like to play around with the resulting image, and I’m freaky about data loss).

So even though I’ve upgraded my Macbook’s hard drive to 500GB internally, I’m still starting to get tight on space.

So I’m fragmenting my iPhoto library to an external disk. The problem with this is now this externally hosted library doesn’t have Time Machine protection.

Here’s what I’m doing;

1. Move my existing iPhoto Library to an external disk called “Photobox 1″
2. Open Time Machine preferences, go to Options, under “Exclude these items from backups:”, I highlight “Photobox 1″ and hit the [ - ] box.  So this externally mounted drive will now be backed up via Time Machine.  
3. Opening “Photobox 1″, I’ve got “iPhoto Library to August 3 2010″.  If I double click on that, iPhoto will open that library.  
4. Holding down the Option key while launching iPhoto will bring up a library picking dialogue.  From there you can choose which library to work from.  

So now, I’ve got space on my Laptop for current photographs, and I’ve got a separated copy of my old iPhoto archive that is still being backed up to my Time Machine drive.

Of course I don’t just move my old iPhoto library to the Time Machine drive, because if I lose my Time Machine drive in that scenario I’ve lost the iPhoto archive and any possible backups.  Ugly!  So let’s not do that.  Remember folks, always segment your backups from your raw data.  Never use your backup as archive; that’s not what it’s for.

A future challenge may be merging a split library, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

"Photobox 1" is a removable SATA drive