saving with Time Machine on Mac?
I'm actually using C1 23 and 24" Mac with the Ventura platform. I have all my images that I use on C1, on an external SSD drive. However, all my 'catalogues' are on the actual Mac PC that I use. I have Time Machine on my Mac setup so that when I do a backup to a 2nd hard drive, it also recognises the external SSD drive with my images, and backs that up at the same time. All good so far. However, I thought I'd test it out to see if I had a crash, that I could actually restore all my images back onto the external SSD drive. I deleted a few original pictures from the SSD drive that I was viewing and editing in C1. I then jumped into Time Machine, found those same images on an older backup, and did a 'restore' of them from Time Machine. They popped back up in my C1 23, and I was able to see them and use them, but alas, all edits had gone. I've tried other things and there seems no way around not losing my edits. There is literally hundreds of hours of processing time on the edits for my images and I'd hate to think if my computer crashed and I restored everything from a Time Machine backup, that I'd lose all my edits. Any geniuses out there who may have an idea what's happening. I don't understand because I thought that C1 stored the piggy back files from each image (with the edit details), in the catalogue. As the catalogue is saved on the actual computer that I'm using, and it was just the 'restored' image that I brought back into the files, in theory I should have still been able to see my edits. Philip
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It sounds as if when you did the TM restore you also (perhaps unknowningly) restored an older C1 catalog.
That said, I do not recommend relying on TM as the primary backup for either your C1 catalog or your original images. Ideally you should be using a 3-2-1 backup method: 3 copies of your data (original + 2 backups) with the backups being on 2 separate media and 1 of the backups being kept offsite. I use CarbonCopyCloner to automate my backups.
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Catalogs supposedly contain edits inside the main database, so you can't just restore individual files, only the entire catalog. Maybe this Time Machine backup followed up on that; any other backup would either do nothing apart from recovering "raw" (unedited) files* or do the same. I do not use catalogs, my understanding is that if you want to import older files with their edits, you need to open the version of catalog containing these edits, export selected images to a session, then close old catalog, open the current and import the session contents - as there is supposedly no export catalog-to-catalog.
*that would need to be added to catalog again, as it would not remember about their existence, as the last action was their removal that you did.
Hopefully I did not state anything misleading.
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This thread should be moved to the Capture One Pro (16.x) for Mac section.
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How do I do that Martin? I'm kind of new here.
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Philip, I’ve already moved it over.
Did Marcin’s suggestion help?1 -
Thanks for that Brian. I appreciate you folks helping, because this one has been hard to work out for me. I'd rather use Time Machine, because each time I change a few images on my archive of images, through C1 (all on my external drive), when I back.up with TM, it will just automatically save the ones that I changed. If I do it manually (by dragging my image archive onto another hard drive), it keeps telling me that copies already exist and do I want to override them. It goes on and on till it drives me nuts. I'm at work at the moment, but I'll have a look when I get back home and try and work out what Marcin was telling me. Cheers
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Post back after you’ve had a chance to review. Marcin is correct but maybe I can explain it a different way if you need me to.
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I just had a moment here at work to read through Marcin's instructions and it looks a bit complicated Brian. I'm used to computers but I'm certainly not a whiz geek. May I get you please to explain it as you suggested. It may be a bit easier for me. Cheers
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Happy to. Do you need it tonight or are you ok with me sitting down at my desk tomorrow and typing it out? I’ve been on the road most of the day and am just catching up on emails before bed.
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Tomorrow's fine Brian. This is a long-term thing I have to get right, so certainly no urgency. I've just put all my images on a new Toshiba 4TB SSD drive, so I'm sure it's not going to crash overnight. Also, they are all backed up on time machine to another new SSD drive, so even if the worst happened, I may lose the edits, but I'll still have all my original RAW files, which is the main thing. Cheers
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Good deal. I’ll get to this tomorrow morning. You have a good night.
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Thanks. It's actually mid-morning here in Perth, Western Australia. You have a good night. Cheers
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Philip, here is a brief explanation of what I suggested.
My C1 catalog is a Referenced Catalog, meaning that all my original images are stored outside C1 on an external drive. I call that drive 'Imagestore'. I use CarbonCopyCloner to automate backups of Imagestore to two other external drives that are my backup drives. Those drives are named ImagestoreBackup and ImagstoreOffsiteBackup. CCC keeps the two backup drives identical to my main drive; theoretically I could swap one of the backup drives for my main Imagestore drive at any time. (For example, if Imagestore suddenly died.) And because the backup drives are 'regular' drives (not TM) I could connect them to any other computer and be back in operation with all my images in minutes.
I also use CCC to automate backups of my C1 catalog. That way I always have an identical copy of my current C1 catalog on a separate drive.
TM does automatic updates too, but does it to only 1 drive & your backup copies are locked inside the TM container, which normally you can only access through the TM app. If your main drive failed, you would have to replace it and then run TM to attempt a restore. That is not always successful.
I recognize the benefits that TM provides and it may serve you well. But it's only 1 backup copy of your data and TM is a proprietary container, which many people including myself do not consider sufficient backup.
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Thought of one more thing. When I finish editing images in C1, I always export them to TIFF at full resolution and using a naming convention that indicates the image is a final version. CCC backs up those images, too, the next time it runs. Exporting finished images is an additional way to protect against losing all your edited images in the event your C1 catalog ever gets corrupted.
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