Backup iPhoto Library

[dlegend]

What's the best way to do this? I use Time Machine for one copy but I was hoping to us an old extra drive solely to backup iPhoto and store off-site. Can I use Time Machine to just back up iPhoto on one drive?

Right now I'm copying my whole library over and it's taking forever. Anything I could use for incremental backups?

 

[Jaro65]

If you have an extra drive, why don't you just use a SuperDuper! and backup the entire HD image? That could be pretty handy in case you run into any issues.

 

[dlegend]

The extra drive I have is only 60gb. Big enough for backing up iPhoto, not big enough to do a whole clone though.

 

[skybolt]

Just copy the entire iPhoto Library from finder to the external.

 

[dlegend]

that's what I've been doing, but it takes a while to copy 40 gigs

 

[Roy Hobbs]

that's what I've been doing, but it takes a while to copy 40 gigs

There's no way to magically speed ug a 40gig transfer. FW800 and a faster drive might help but thats about it

 

[John.B]

The problem with iPhoto (maybe the only insurmountable problem) is that you have to backup the entire bundled library at once. One reason I went with Aperture and then Lightroom is that each image file is backed up individually, so an incremental backup only backs up new or changed files and not my whole library. Unfortunately, the larger that library gets, the longer that backup is going to take. I wish Apple would add a module into Time Machine that could reliably look inside the iPhoto library and backup just the new/changed image files...

 

[jackerin]

Not sure if it works, but you could try showing package contents of the iPhoto library files and then copying over just the folders you want. Again, not sure if iPhoto will properly read the library afterwards if you need to restore from that backup, but if it can't then you can always just show package contents again and drag-drop into iPhoto.