How to keep your iPhoto Library safe (Mac)

Losing years of pictures saved on an iPhoto library is a disaster, just imagine your baby’s first video, the happiest moment with your family and friends all gone..

The easiest way to protect your iphoto library is to save it on an external hard drive, here’s what i did…

First you need an external hard drive, I recommend Western Digital MyBook Studio 2, which has four connectivity options firewire 400, firewire 800, usd and eSATA it also features RAID 0 and RAID 1 functionality. Here’s the steps.

  1. Connect your MyBook Studio II to your mac using firewire 800 cable that’s included with it.
  2. Install WD Drive Manager, it’s on the software disk that comes with your MyBook.. It also have WD anywhere app which I’d rather not use since i prefer Apples Time Machine. Once installed you’ll see a WD logo on your task bar.
  3. Configure your External Hard Drive and set it to RAID 01 mode, you can do this by clicking on the WD icon at the taskbar select your installed external HD and click “Launch RAID Manager”, you will see four columns status, serial no. capacity, setup, change the setup to RAID 1 HFS+ and hit configure.
  4. Now your HD is set you need to move your iPhoto Libray to that HD, goto “Macintosh HD/Users/<your login name>”  copy Pictures folder to your external HD once done go back to your original “Pictures” folder and rename or delete “iPhoto Library”.
  5. Open iPhoto, since you deleted or renamed your previous iPhoto Library it’ll now ask you what library to use, now just browse for your iPhoto Library saved on your Pictures Folder on your MyBook Studio II and you’re done..

Now I can say your photos are 98% safe, MyBook Studio II have two hard drives and at RAID 1 configuration it mirros each drive so if one fails all data are saved on the other drive, this will make your external HD slow but your photo’s safe, so why 98% safe? It’s unlikey that those two drives will fail at the same time, but who knows..

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2 Comments to “How to keep your iPhoto Library safe (Mac)”

  1. john doe 10 November 2009 at 5:05 pm #

    Raid 1 does exaxt copy of one drive to another. It helps if another part of the mirror physically breaks. It doesnt help if your FS(FileSystem) gets corrupted as then both disks are under same condition.

    Reply
    • Edu Mansanas 11 November 2009 at 12:53 pm #

      I agree with you John, thanks for pointing that out.. cheers

      Reply

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