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Lesson Info

Hard Drive Management and Backup Strategy

We're going to start every good work flow starts with file management so that's where we're going to start, we have to start there we're going to talk about file security, we're going to talk about hard drives, we're going to talk about all of that kind of naming structures all of that stuff has to be talked about now so that's where we're gonna go first, eh? So I'm going to go and and open up some schematics here and I have different versions of these schematics and all of them are available by the way on the course pages well that you khun you khun download I I think when you purchased the course eso these schematics are available as well, but you khun you can see that I have various schematics here and some of them are for a tower and some of them are for a regular I mac and some of them are for a laptop and so you'll see different schematics for different kind of circumstances. Today, what we want to talk about in the very, very beginning is the idea of the goto the working state o...

f your jobs of ofyour system basically, and so I'm going tio show you this schematic and I want to talk about it for a little bit because you got to understand how we put where we put things if you're working on a tower that allows you to have multiple drives now, the new mac pro doesn't have drives inside of it. It just has one flash drive inside of it, which is perfect because that's actually the way it should be if it inspires you not to put files on it and that's what they're really trying to get teo is just the computer is for programs and that's pretty much everything else goes outside of that system, so on an old tower you would have won would be the os hard drive right here, and you can see that I'm just trying to point with the right there, you can see that the os hard drive is on the tower, and then we could also put other drives in there as well. We could put in a working drive we could put in an archive driving a portfolio drive so we can have a whole series of drives inside of a computer. But the important thing to recognize from the discussion that we're having here is that when we create a system where we're going to put our files, the os system or the operating system needs to be on its own hard drive so that it can run independently of other things because when you're spinning and now we've got to solid state, this laptop is a solid state drive s so it doesn't have spinning things in it, which makes it a lot faster, but if you're running a regular drive in a bigger computer usually using a spinning drive and that takes time to access the files, and so if you're accessing files and trying to access photos at the same time there's a delay because of spin of the drive itself is the slowdown to your computer. You can't access the information because it's on the other side of the disc and so with the advent of solid state drives, now we have the ability to put two things on the same drive and start drawing from it, but solid states very small, which means that if you have a bunch of programs on your solid state internal drive, which is on the new mac pro and also on the most of the new mac, I think all mac laptops now have solid state drives, and so that allows us to have fast access to the data, but they're small and so we don't have a lot of space for a lot of different files and so it's kind of one way or the other either go spending drives and it takes longer to access them and you have more information on him or you go solid state, which is faster, but you have less space for the information, so it's kind of you've got to decide which way you want to go, and we'll talk about both options throughout the next three days, but the operating system goes on one dr, and then your photos go on another drive, and that allows you to be independent of this computer, for instance, if for some reason this computer went down and went south than my hard drive is independent and it's not actually inside this computer, so I could take that hard drive and plug it into a different computer, and then I'm back online. And as long as I have a constant backup situation of that photo drive, I have never lost my shirt in the process of working on files, right? No matter what, because the computer gets a lot of wear and tear it's always on it's, always moving it's always, you know, that's, the thing that's going to go south before some drive is going to go south, especially if you have backups made and we'll talk about backups in a minute. So when you look at this tower, then we wantto have on operating system, and then we won't have a separate drive we call the working dr, the other options for an archive drive and a portfolio drive, you can kind of debate whether or not you want to get to that point. You know when you're starting if you if you're starting this workflow from scratch you might not necessarily have the money to spend on a whole bunch of drives right at the top at the beginning so what you would do is partition a drive and part of that drive would be working part of that drive would be archive part of that drive would be portfolio you could start that way but you definitely want a drive that holds photos that's what it's for okay, once you have that instituted then we're going to talk about the file management portions so we're going to go to my desktop and we're gonna open up my working dr this is a working drive that we've created here just for creative lives so that we have every job on here weaken play with and it's not everything in the kitchen sink but if you let me just show you all the files that we have so there's the work these all the jobs were currently working on now you notice there's not a ton and that should be the state of your working drive you shouldn't be working on stuff from two thousand won that means you're too slow now I have some things from two thousand ten because their little things that I'm going to be showing you s o I just grabbed a smattering of jobs but you should be in the current year at the very least and hopefully you're within the couple three months or four months of what you've just shot and then everything else should be disappearing off this working dr because it is no longer needing to be on your plate and the more you put on your plate the more you drop things through the cracks I'm all right okay all right so let's let's just look at the state of that clean drive right now just so that we all get a sense of what you're working dr should look like it should be fairly minimal amount of jobs now if you come into this you'll see that I've named them certain names like for instance, the ultimate wedding so you can see that it's got a reverse date so two thousand thirteen o nine o three underscore hultman underscore wedding and that tells me what when the job was shot who I shot it for and what it wass very easy to find anything on here and you'll also notice that I have one up here that says uh platt so two thousand fourteen o one o one platt new year's day who do you suppose the client waas mean for my wife actually more to the point so my wife is the client and so I shoot it for the client which is platte it's on the day new year's day and it's a little new year's day party for my daughter so I shoot that, and the lesson here is that it doesn't matter whether or not you're shooting a job for a client or whether you're shooting something for yourself or whether you shooting stock you treat them all the same nothing ever gets done differently in your workflow no matter what it is, whether it's personal or work related, it doesn't matter if it's free or if it's paid doesn't matter, we always do everything the same otherwise things fall through the cracks because you don't know where you are and whatever workflow okay, so it's important that we name our jobs correctly and it's important that we do them the same every time. Now I'm going to go into save this uh uh let's, go into the altman wedding and inside the alton wedding you can see how it's organized you have a final catalog right here, so there is the catalog itself that's what happens after the job is complete so this job is obviously complete because it was a long time ago. It was a year ago, but that's that's where the job catalog is going to go, you have art proofs, so we made some art proofs for them. I made some blogger images for them we have a cat way have raw images so there's all of your raw files here's your slide show so there's, all sorts of things that have been done to this wedding and so they are inside the catalog, including even the release is that we have to allow us to show them to you today are inside of this folder so everything to do with the job is inside of the job folder. Now to see that on the schematic than you can see, this is the way your file needs to be organized. So if this is the jones wedding inside of it there's a raw folder where all of your raw images go there's an edits folder if you do some photo shop work or something like that there's a folder for, you know, putting him up online is a folder for me, you know, making a proof book there's a folder for slide shows anything if it contracts anything that you want to put into the job that's associated with the job goes into this folder so that the folder itself can be simply moved to an archive later and everything related to it goes with it everything, even if it's like little snapshots of you with the bride or something like that for everything goes with it. Yeah, quick question do you have a folder that you use that's that's pre populated with all the folders inside that air named you sort of uses your template folder each time you create a job it's a great idea some people do that I don't okay and the reason I don't do that is that light room creates those folders as needed based on pre sense that we create in the export dialog box and so when we're exporting it's creating the folder structure for me awesome s o I don't necessarily have to do that but it's it's a fine idea there's nothing wrong with doing that if you want to pre populate those folders there's also tomorrow we'll talk about actually pre populating a catalogue so that you have a template catalog cool and then you could literally every time you start a job, you could open up that template catalog so that has all the information pre populated and we'll talk about that tomorrow. So that's great that's good idea I don't necessarily do that but it's a great idea. Um okay, so when you look at the working state of my job, I'm going to have everything in an operating system is going to be on the main hard drive for the computer, then all of the photos they're going to be in the working drive, which is in a jobs folder inside of that and this is the job this is what the job looks like now once and obviously all of these drives any drive you have I don't care what it is needs to be backed up period just back it up all right back up back up back up back up back up um so we want everything to be backed up now um well are then going to work on this job and once the job is done, we're going to take that job too a new state basically it's going to become different so once we're finished so the job gets all done and we're all complete we've delivered stuff to the client we've put stuff online we're all finished with the job the job is going to end up inside of an archive dr the archive dr allows you to not have to keep buying new drives every single time you fill up it got to that point where you you fill up a drive and then like, I'm enough room for my next job so you could buy another drive and you start filling that one up and then that gets filled up by another driver filled out and then you're like, I don't even know where the altman wedding is. I don't know if it's on this drive earth on that driver, so then you're plugging in a bunch of drives trying to figure out where things are and you can't find him so the archive dr allows you then to congregate everything once it's done into a yearly dr so you buy one dr per year with a backup so you buying two drives but they're just spinning drives they don't have to be fast drives, they just have to be reliable drives and you have a backup for him and you soon as you're done, you're going to take that job off of your working drive, which is your constant drive that you're constantly working on and you move it over to the archive drive the archive dr khun b four terabytes it can be two terabytes it could be really big and as long as you have a backed up so you have two drives that you buy every year that's the total cost of running the system two drives a year and that it's about for I think I got a three terror bite the other day for one hundred nineteen bucks or something like that, so every year you spend about two hundred fifty bucks for your archive drive for that year and its backup and you're done and you're into the system. Okay? All right, so we're going to move everything off to our archive drive and when we do that it's going to look different so now we've removed it from the working drives so it's no longer on that working dr and now it is in a job the same job folder but now it's inside of the archive drive and as part of that process of archiving the job, we will also take our favorite images and put them into our portfolio because your your archive drivers not always going to be attached because that's old stuff it stuff that you don't need to work on constantly what's going to be attached is the portfolio, and for me, I just travel around with a little tiny portfolio drive and that's the drive that I am going to constantly attach and play with the images inside of that dr, and we'll show you that later on today, when we put the images into our final portfolio drive, but we would just select our favorite images and we'll put them into the portfolio drive. So now we have two copies of the best images. We have copies on our archive, and we'll have copies on the portfolio drive, and the portfolio is what we will constantly go, too, because we don't need a lot of people say, well, what if I need to, you know, look through all of the other photos from every job that I've ever shot in order to find a great image when you found the great images while you were working on the job in the first place, just trust your instincts on that and trust that those are the only images worth showing. Because those are the images you chose and you loved those are the ones that you want to put in magazines and those are the ones you want to put on your website those are the ones you want to show your clients that's what gets you the job's not the random family photos that you took on the wedding as well those don't get you jobs so we put on ly the best stuff in our portfolio and that's what we're constantly looking to draw images from all right so that is the final state of the portfolio notice the little red drive down here do you see this little guy that's the rejects drive the rejects drive is where all photos that we didn't select they go to die there okay so they were in the full collection but once we finished selecting and going through the job there's this folder of rejects that we got rid of we just didn't like him those go to the way station which is a rejects drive because if you just deleted him that would be fine if you were the client but if you're not the client and the client comes back to you and says, hey, I want to see you know you missed somebody or whatever uncle joe never got shot right and you like crap deleted them so that's what the rejects drivers for and the rejects drive you'll need to buy one you plug that greed ex drivin take all of the rejects from every job and you just put them in a folder for of rejects for that job, you name it the same thing is the job and put him into this drive a year later, six months later, whatever that drive will start to fill up and when it fills up, you'll go back to the driver, highlight the oldest couple files and delete him because by that point, the client has already seen the images knows that they're happy with him hasn't seen anything missing and now those khun completely go away. So it's kind of a little insurance policy is just a kind of a way station it's almost like the trash bin on your you know that have a trash bin on the pc it's a recycle bin and the mac it's called the trash that trash is there as like a hoops, so you delete something and then you have to delete it again. That's what this is you're deleting something and then six months down the road you have to delete it again and that's just kind of that insurance policy just in case you shouldn't have deleted it in the first place okay, all right, so that's the way the final archive state ofyour drives should look now I want to go then into a different feel quick, quick yes you might say so in your workflow and you might have mentioned this but how how long do you keep those drives like when you tell your clients the rejects like is it five years or ten years what kind of a guaranteed the rejects its just once you've seen the work if you don't object and want something I'm going to give you until basically the site is only active for about three to six months anyway yeah and so by that point if you haven't complained there's no more guarantees that I'm keeping everything sure but I keep everything else indefinitely in definitely great definitely thing and it's always remember that you keep everything so you're keeping all of your images that you are the ones that you're selecting anyway all your selected images you're keeping all of those but you're keeping him in a raw state in the studio but I'm also keeping a full size j peg up online and that's important because now I have a copy so if if everything went south and someone my house burned down and the whole state of arizona during down so that means that my mic archive copy somehow got burned down which is in a different location you know then I'd be okay because I still have a pristine j peg up online that I can refer teo and that I could pull down and use its totally printable total usable s o I'm not completely out of luck if everything goes south, which I really highly doubt that whatever happened I mean, I'm in arizona, you know, like I there was a big problem when in new orleans when the man there were photographers who lost everything because the whole city was in trouble, everybody was underwater and so there are files that were just underwater on ly people who had an online copy we're safe and those people were able just download their online copies and so in louisiana there was an issue arizona they could melt could melt you know, I suppose, but you know, we just don't have any natural disasters like that the scorpions maybe or something I'm come down sting might drives or something yeah, other than your os drive, you're actually talking about four drives attached to your computer at one time or another at one time or another there's four drives associated with the computer there is a os drive which is in the computer you never see it and then there is a portfolio drive which is attached occasionally to the computer when you need it. But keep in mind that the catalog can be on the computer and you don't necessarily have to attach the drive to be working on the photos and we'll talk about that tomorrow so even though we have all these other drives, we don't nest necessarily have to have them attached and we can still work on the files because we have catalogs that have smart previews and things like that and so we'll talk about that workflow tomorrow, but the important thing is that we have the drives that air bigger that can be off, you know, in the cabinet or wherever and we can still be working on them here, but we'll take occasionally attached that portfolio drive we occasionally attach the archive drive and then the only one that we attached constantly is the working drive that one so really you're looking at a drive in your computer and a drive sitting off to the side of your computer or if you have a tower it's internal yeah, I'm sure tomorrow you'll talk about the tough tech duo, so I have that so my working dr is on there. The question is, how do I get things off of the working drive on too? Move it to an archive dr on another drive do you use an archive? Dr that's also a tough tech like I don't have a tower, so have a mac laptop. So how do you get things from you're working drive onto another dr what do you use if you're not using a tough time? I'm so glad you asked that question because that was the next slide, so this is a circumstance that I I made this one later so this is the newer schematic on dh this is for computers that are not necessarily heavy with internal drives because that's mostly where we're going now days with smaller laptop smaller you know mac pros and stuff like that this is mostly where we're going and so if you look at this state and I know it looks like a lot of stuff going on but it's fairly simple actually if you look at this dr here the working dr can be internal because there's two drives in here there's a solid state drive that runs the programs and then internally there's secondary drive that has all the working files senate if you choose not to have to drive inside then you're working dr would just be an external drive sitting off to the side over here is a working raid back up so this is this one is called a c are you on dh it's just a box with two drives and it functions just like the tough tech do and I'm going to talk about you in a minute but the idea is that this drive a here the top drive drive number one is receiving all the information and dr number two is receiving a a copy of that at the same time and so what we do is we just say the working dr is whatever we're working on on dh then we're backing it up to that right now the archive is simply you, can you? This is a four bay j bod system. And let me let me explain raid one versus j pod raid one means that you have two copies being made simultaneously, so whatever's here is always here at the same time. And if for some reason you have to pull out the second drive and put in a new one, say the second one is reported as being bad or something like that when you pull it out and put in a new drive, this drive will immediately start duplicating itself to this drive until it's done so all this dr always wants the second drive to be exactly duplicated to itself. Always that's it happens as a system. It doesn't happen based on software it's not happening, you know, at twelve o'clock every night, it's happening immediately. The second you plug it in and turn it on, it checks and then it copies it down and it doesn't have to be attached the computer. I can actually take my tough tech deal, which I have another one here, so that we can talk about it. I can take the tough tech duel and pull out dr number two and I ca and put in a new drive number two and when I've put it in and go like that there's a power cable that I can put in I could just plug this into I don't have to plug it in the computer is plugged into the wall and it will duplicate the information from from dr one to drive to without being attached to a computer it's just internally that's what it wants to do so it's a really, really safe little unit that doesn't necessarily have to be attached the computer to do its job, which is fantastic. So when we talk about a raid one, we're talking about immediately duplicated data based on a piece of hardware. Now ajay bod system is simply a set of drives like a tower, but it's an external tower and that tower has those four drives or two drives or eight drives or however many drives you want and you can just plug in whatever drives you wanted to and as you plug them in, they just show up on your desktop like a secondary drive somewhere as though you were plugging in a bunch of external drives. The advantage to a system like that when you want to start plugging archive drives and things like that is that you plug in the drive instead of buying a housing to that drive every time you buy a drive in the housing you're spending twice a cz much money on a house to drive then if you buy one system that doesn't cost very much to buy and then you just plug in drives to it now the drives air half of expensive because you're buying them just the bare drive what you're just buying, you're just buying this drive, so this is an internal drive right here, so you're buying this this is far less expensive than some, you know, lissy drive or whatever that's gotta housing on it because you're paying for the housing every single time this way you're just paying for the drive itself and you're plugging it in to the j bod system and you can plug in this drive and then when you're done with it, you pull that out put into different drive and they make ah one based system to that's just plug in your drive and plug it out and that all of these air made by sierra I really like him there they're really tough and they're reliable, but you can also go really inexpensive and buy something like this it's just a toaster that and literally I can just take this dr and just like a toaster aiken just and then it lights up on my computer and things like this cost about thirty to fifty dollars and so a long time ago, before I found cr use stuff which I really liked, I just used these toasters andre were inexpensive they toaster itself these things and I not specifically talking about this one I have like through four of these they die on you they just die it doesn't kill these but these just die on you because they're really cheaply made so you go buy another one for thirty or forty bucks but if you buy something from siara you it doesn't die on you it's it's serious like they make stuff for like the fbi type stuff so it's like really serious equipment so but you can just plug it into the toaster or plug it into your cr ew jay bod system and then it lights up as though it's its own and the beauty is you can also plug in little drives to sew your laptop drives could be plugged into those things as well as well as the j bod systems from c r u so it's very easy to get internal internal drives tito work as though they're external drives and you spent half as much money on it so utilize bear drives as much as possible in fact you can actually take this is a little sled that's made by c gate and it's supposed to like it's just got a connector for the satya connector on the drives and noticed that that little connector right there that's the same thing and this sled literally I just plug it in like this and it'll just go online and so I just plug in drives into you know a little sled connector it's made by sea gate it's just a little fled and its fire I mean it's thunderball so it's fast as it can be and this is a solid state laptop drive so you plug this baby in and it screams fast because it is that as fast as it can get so these this is a pretty good little system too so I I'm not necessarily married to anyone specific way to connect these drives it's just that I prefer to do it in a less expensive way right everybody with me on that you you don't want to spend your entire you know savings on hard drives and hard drive connectors and whatever and so really there's a lot of different ways to do it you can do it with one of these little toaster kind of deles you can get a much more robust system that works better from c r u and it won't break on you but either way works so it's just a matter of what you want to do and the c r u systems are very uh reasonably priced I mean the tough tech duel which is what you see here eyes only is less than three hundred bucks I think it's like two to eighty year some with with drives with with dr right now alone though it was three hundred bucks so just the unit itself three hundred bucks and then whatever drives you want to put in it can can be pricey or not pricey, depending on the quality of the drive. So it's not an expensive proposition to get units like this, and the and the bigger units are less expensive than small units because they don't need to compact the stuff into small okay, so the point of all of that discussion then, is when you're talking about drives it's not that they it's not that you're going to be confused by I've got tons of drives and I've got too many drive's connected. Now you're gonna have one dr generally connected like you see here, I've got one drive connected currently to my laptop, so if we hide this, you can see that I've got one dr hears this drive is my computer drive, where all of my data for my programs is on this drive is the working drive and that's what we're showing here is the working dr. All right, so now I have solid state drives inside of this have to solid state drives that are currently receiving the data so it's as fast as it can be it's, super fast, it's not having any access time issues and one one solid state is on the top one solid state is in the bottom and then if for some reason I need teo let's say I just did a shoot and I put all my information on the shoot then I can simply just take this I'm doing this wallets on I could just simply take this drive push that while it's on that just turned it off and I can take this one take a third copy dr and shove this drive in I don't I'm not going to do this now because I don't want to have to spend all that time to copy it and shove it in there and as soon as I do, it will immediately start copying down to there and now this one is a complete copy of what we've just of the state of that dr is a complete exact copy this one can go back into this box and be shipped home or it can be handed to the assistant and carried separately so now we have three copies to copies here one copies somewhere else so that security when it comes to files all right and it's all because it's simple because of a j barman of ah raid one system if you're if you're going to do when I push this and watch this it's going to immediately start it's goingto ask me it says, oh, I've got a new disk in here do you want me to do it? Yeah, yes and now, it's rebuilding. So now it's making sure that those two copies are exactly the same. So it'll just rebuild and I can still work on the drive, wants rebuilding. So this is I think that the raid one system especially this little tough tak du, is the best investment I've ever made when it comes to file security. Because everything that I have is absolutely secure all the time because I have three copies all. And when I travel once I've shot the third copy, gets fed ex home. All right, so, any questions? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Okay, way. Have a handful of people asking, and this is going back. Just a touch about online storage recommendations. Okay, online storage is problematic because it's to the band with this too small to get your raw files up there. So here's here's my recommendation when it comes to file storage and I, this slide here actually goes over a little bit. But if you look at the system, you can see that cloud services listed right above the working the computer itself, cloud services air amazingly useful for several things. Settings for, like, light room settings. Things like that files say, documents, music, things like that on dh, then software. I get all of my software from cloud type downloads so my I'm on adobe creative cloud so that all of my software is in the clouds so no matter where I am I can get access to it I have all of my any software that I downloaded that I couldn't get on the app store for mac so I buy everything I cannot first search the mac store the app store on the mac so that I have cloud services available so that if this computer goes down and I buy a new one I just download all the software that I've previously purchased so that's another really important cloud service and then I use dropbox for anything else so if I have a program that I've downloaded or I take it I make it take the disk image of it and I put it on my dropbox so every piece of software that I use whether it's a plug in or whether it's a real piece software is somewhere in the cloud available to me as soon as I plug in a computer that's important so cloud service they're great for that cloud services air really great for storing j pegs of images so for instance I use smugmug so every image that I shoot for a client and I'm delivering to the client goes onto smugmug smugmug pro takes the image keeps the full pristine j peg on their servers there servicer obviously duplicated and so now I have a full, pristine j peg up online that's where cloud services air valuable. Now, when it comes to raw images, if you wanted to try and upload your raw images, I would make sure that you don't do that until after the entire job is completely processed and done. Once that's done, then you have a smaller set. Then you could possibly upload that entire set. It might take you eighteen hours to do it, but you could at least get it done. And then you could use carbonite. I know a lot of people love back blaze so carbonite dot com back blaze amazon has its own storage facilities. Eso you could possibly use some those and they would be great on ly people. I think in texas right now have google's like super fast internet line, so those guys could do all the online stores they want if you have that google crazy fast internet but the rest of us are kind of stuck in the dark ages when it comes to speed of connection to that. So and upload is always the slowest portion of your internet, so you'll pay for like amazing download speeds, but your upload speeds crawl, so I have to pay a lot to have good upload speeds. Terrific that was a great answer eso thank you it was the bottom line was smugmug which I use as well which is just that extra storage for the jpeg stir up there there and it's unlimited limited for every file just make a pristine and when you make it don't make and everybody will suggest oh use a ninety quality no use one hundred quality srg b j pegs so that it is good as it can be and still be seen really well in the web and well that the sargi is important I would prefer it to be a pro photo rgb or an rgb nineteen ninety eight color profile because that's better color but those aren't seen well on the web so you have to dumb it down s rgb but that's what you print from anyway and so that's what I'm sending the smuggling is one hundred quality full size j peg that's s rgb that's going up smugmug so if if everything was lost I still have my images online that I could download to myself and then use those so where's case scenario I have exactly what I've been printing from for the client anyway and the new interface is awesome it is and we're actually going on on wednesday well actually go through the process of uploading files and using the interface toe light room so that I don't even have to goto I never go to smuggling right never I go too smug mug in light room so I have no interest in going to an online service toe upload my photos and to maneuver and change things I do everything from light room including choosing the pricing structure for the client so I like to stand like yeah that's good one reiteration question the toaster tell a story that's the name of the toaster because I like I won't okay it's called dr bai doc drive and I am not going to tell you the name of this toaster specifically because that's a dead one it died okay I'm telling you they die all the time they're pieces of plastic that were made in like I don't know somewhere in china or whatever and they were made very poorly and they're just they die all the time that's why they cost thirty five dollars a supposed to two hundred dollars or whatever so it's called a drive baby doc go and find the cheapest one you can because even the one that costs like sixty dollars is also going to die so by the cheap one and let it die and then buy another cheap one or go to see are you and buy a good one yeah you know either way it doesn't matter to me but you just just buy a dock that you can shove drives into so you have to you don't have to keep buying expensive drives the housings so expensive great thanks. So looking at this then schematic that we have here you can see a lot of interfacing options but the most important interfacing option and this is kind of back to your question is here's this travel drive so mice might cr ew tough tech do is built for travel and so I run around with it and I work on it on the road this way so it's connected to the laptop and then all my store my files on my laptop I store them here so when I'm importing something from a job it's going to go on to the raid one system always to the external drive now the the file or the catalogue the light room catalog that I'm using toe look at them is on this computer and I'll show you that if you if you look here here's all my all my jobs right there but the catalog that's referring to them is actually inside the pictures folder inside of the lightman folder see that working catalog right there that's on this computer so if I reject that dr so I'm gonna so I'm looking at light room right? But I'm gonna right click this job the drive the working driving ejected so it's gone it's off my computer now and just to prove the point I will unplug it see there it's unplugged so I am not connected anymore to the to the working dr but when I go backto light room I still have the ability to look at the files so see ellis has these question marks those question marks tell me that it doesn't know where they are because I unplugged it but I can still look at the files I'm looking at one now I can go to you know, a photoshoot here and I can see all of my images and I can look at them I can even zoom into him and see if they're sharp like I can play with these images and if I build which will talk about tomorrow if I build the smart previews I could have actually just, um I could even export images to my blawg I could do a lot of stuff without this even being attached so I can store the file somewhere and then this laptop khun b travelled around everywhere and I never even have to be attached to the the files yeah, what happens if you're working on multiple different computers and you need that catalog to travel with you? We'll talk about that tomorrow, ok? Yeah so we'll go through that process of working on multiple computers tomorrow so keep that in mind and we'll get there so I have tried exporting like to print things like that from just smart previews because I'm what working. Tell it just like that on my hard drive, my block, and it won't. It says it can't export from smart previews. I can add it, but it won't export. What am I doing wrong? Will you cover that later? We'll cover that we'll actually export images tomorrow from it.