I'm using Lightroom and I want to move all my photos off of my internal hard drive to an external drive. I'm clueless when it comes to this stuff. Should I also move Catalog.lrcat and CatalogPreviews.lrdata as well??? All of my photos are taking up space on my hard drive...I want to move everything for that reason and also if I ever have a computer crash, I can just plug in the external drive to another computer with Lightroom and be all set. Thank you. I want to do this but I'm afraid to mess everything up!
An external drive is more likely to crash than your internal drive. You really need to save images in 3 places. I use 2 external drives (primary and mirror backup) plus weekly backups I keep off site (in case of fire or other disaster) with 2 portable external solid state drives I rotate for my off site storage, which is a bank safe depost box. Can't help with the Lightroom stuff. I have it, but haven't yet embraced it.
Moving to external drive is fine, but like the above poster said, it's better to make your external drive redundant, so that you have multiple copies. I myself need to get around to mirroring my 500gb drive. I think in lightroom, you can create a backup catalog and save it anywhere you want. Make sure you save that in multiple places too. The last thing you run into is that the photos will now be in a new location. So in lightroom, it will say that the folder for the pictures is missing. You just need to re-point it to the new location (external drive).
