Hi - I've been using LR since it came out, running it on a PC in our London base, a second PC in Cheshire and on a laptop for field work.
1/ there's no problem with the license - LR doesn't seem to mind the same copy being installed on 3 machines
2/ Shootist's strategy of using the laptop as a temporary repository makes sense. My approach is to have a Catalog called TEMP_RAW on my laptop. Whenever I'm doing a field shoot I transfer to this at the end of the day - remembering to keyword on each dump from the SD card so that you have maximum information available for images when you return to base. I will often do some quick edits on this systems (rating / colour code / crop). As I'm not worried about keeping a history of these edits when I'm ready to transfer to the main system I select all, hit control + S to update the metadata, and then IMPORT all the images to my main PC where I also have a TEMP_RAW folder. I simply stick to the file names generated by the camera and import to eg /2009/10-19.
3/ Once images are transferred and backed up I delete them from the laptop and from the SD cards..
4/ On my main machine I do final edits / corrections etc and generate JPEGS / web shows etc for the client.
5/ I run an automatic daily backup to a mirror drive so that all data is protected, and once I've got 100 GB or so of images on the drive I transfer the images to DVD AND to an external hard drive for archive (I've been using stacked 250 GB firewire HDs but will be upgrading to stacked 1 TB drives). I'll eventually transfer to a new write-only media when the replacement for DVD is stable.
6/ I create a NEW catalog for each Hard Drive, with all the images stored chronologically. If I now need to find a photo for the period 2007 I fire up the archive HD and open the appropriate LR catalog (hold down the ctrl key on a windows machine while starting the program). I then search on keywords / dates.
7/ I have a portable 1TB drive and on a regular basis make copies to this so that I keep a parallel archive in both homes. This is important so that I can give clients access to images where ever I'm based + it gives me belt and braces backup!
This works really well for me - and I've found LR 2.5 stable and reliable.
Hope it helps....
