I get email messages every week from photographers who are on the verge of completely filling up their Photo Storage hard drives. Now you would think that moving your entire photo library from a small drive over to a bigger disk would be easy, but unfortunately for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic users this is a rather complex process. So in the video tutorial below, I am going to show you how to move all of your photos to a larger hard drive without upsetting Lightroom Classic.
I need to stress that what I do in this video is not an image backup system. I have other in-depth tutorials for you on how to backup all of your photography and your Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalog elsewhere using external hard drives. What we are going to do today is to replace one storage device with another.
Moving all of your photographs from a small drive over to a larger one does nothing to protect your precious images if that new bigger hard drive were to fail. If you do not have an up-to-date backup of everything then I urge you to deal with that problem first before you proceed with this tutorial!
As you will see throughout this video, I am going to use a wonderful utility called Carbon Copy Cloner for this project. I believe that something like Carbon Copy Cloner is essential when it comes time to move all of your images from one drive to another but this program is only available for Mac users.
There is a free utility from Microsoft out there called the Windows SyncToy for you PC users that will work just fine for this project.
If you are working with the Windows SyncToy then be sure that you nail down the drive letter assignment for all of your external devices before you begin this project. And be sure to set up a one-way, a left to right, style sync only. Two-way syncing could be disastrous for you Windows users!
Finally, I need to warn you that there is an element of risk involved in this process. Moving all of your photos to a larger hard drive without upsetting Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic is nothing to fear but this is serious business. So please rewind this video as often as you need and don’t jump into this process until you are sure that you have redundant reliable backups.
Related Tutorials:
- How To Format An External Hard Drive
- Recommended External Hard Drives (Mac)
- Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic Image & Catalog Storage Options
- Backing Up Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic & Your Photography