Workflow & Storage

[Vsisishi68]

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Hello all,

I’m seriously considering buying an M11-P after using a Q2 for a long time and, more importantly, discovering the magic of the Leica MP. However, I do have a question about the workflow — particularly regarding image storage, especially given the file sizes.

I’ve been using Lightroom (the cloud version) for a while now, but the storage is limited to 1TB, and I’m already using 300GB. I’m wondering if this setup is sustainable.

What does your workflow look like? What would you recommend? Thanks!

[LocalHero1953]

In basic terms, I separate my image management and editing from back-up.

I use Lightroom Classic with all my images stored locally. I have a local back-up as well, but use Backblaze for cloud back-up. I pay extra for it, but I'm not limited by storage capacity, and it takes all my other files as well.

I used to use Lightroom CC and paid for 2 Tb online storage, but it was unsustainable - I'm up to around 4-5Tb now.

Edited June 2 by LocalHero1953

[pippy]

I use portable hard-drives.

Having leared my lesson 'the hard way' I now keep everything stored on at least two different drives and, in the case of my personal work, on three.

This is a very good model. Very small (size of a credit-card) with 2Tb capacity and a very fast read/write speed;

https://www.samsung.com/uk/memory-storage/portable-ssd/portable-ssd-t7-2tb-gray-mu-pc2t0t-ww/

Philip.

 

Edited June 2 by pippy

[lexffm]

My workflow also manages my storage needs. I have a laptop with 2 x 2 TB storage and the standard 1 TB OneDrive from Microsoft.

After plugging in my SD card, I first set OneDrive to not sync. Then I import the DNG files (L). The next step is to open LR and import the files. First, I separate the wheat from the chaff. This way, I don't carry all the unnecessary clutter with me, and only then do I sync the files to OneDrive. Make sure that the files are also deleted from the hard drive in LR. And, of course, do everything as quickly as possible.

At least, that's my approach, and it's worked well for me so far.

[Smudgerer]

I have the PP working iMac with Lightroom Classic as my post production "tool". All image files are stored on a local 8TB Raid, with two other 8TB outboard hard drives that are full back-ups / clones of the image files and the LrC library........Everything sync'd using Carbon Copy Cloner. Nothing to any Cloud services. Works well, so far!

Regarding M11 files, I have yet to shoot at the full 60mp, mainly shoot using the 18mp choice. So my files are not too "heavy" to move around or work om. So far for what I do for my own "stuff" I have yet to find any disadvantage with the smaller files choice, even when printing to A1 size.

[Crem]

54 minutes ago, Vsisishi68 said:

 

Hello all,

I’m seriously considering buying an M11-P after using a Q2 for a long time and, more importantly, discovering the magic of the Leica MP. However, I do have a question about the workflow — particularly regarding image storage, especially given the file sizes.

I’ve been using Lightroom (the cloud version) for a while now, but the storage is limited to 1TB, and I’m already using 300GB. I’m wondering if this setup is sustainable.

What does your workflow look like? What would you recommend? Thanks!

I have about 4TB of images and video from over the years as I save all my raw files. I use Lightroom Classic and portable drives. Recent work stays on my MacBook Pro. Older work gets moved over to the portable drives.

Backup strategy matters a lot with my workflow:

I buy portable drives in pairs. On occasion I move the oldest files to a portable drive (drag and drop in LrC). I then use SuperDuper (paid app on Mac) to clone the drive to a second drive. I find this works well and I am not limited by cloud storage problems like slow upload speeds or 1TB of space. It just requires I am careful to always make sure I have two copies of each file. I find this easy to do and I also make weekly TimeMachine backups on my Mac to another pair of portable drives. 

My plan is to re-clone the drives (super duper) every few years to refresh the magnetic fields on the drives. Right now I have a total of 4x 5TB drives. Two for LrC and two for TimeMachine. If had a much larger amount of data I would switch over to a couple of mirrored NAS boxes, but I really don’t want to deal with IT work at home. 

Edited June 2 by Crem

[Tseg]

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I use Photomator/Pixelmator Pro on a Mac Studio, stored locally on external 4TB SSD storage and backed up locally to an external 14TB HDD.

[Jeff S]

LR Classic, no cloud, Mac Studio M2 Ultra with 64 GB, 2 external 2TB SSDs, one kept offsite.

[Photoworks]

My archive is about 125TB of data, they are on NAS and backed up to other spinning drives.
I am using SmugSmug to deliver images to clients and to keep a backup of all my JPGs. it can store RAW's but it is more money.

Most backup solutions are not affordable online with this data.

[DadDadDaddyo]

Separating backup and processing platforms is a good practice. 

I worked over 20 years at an R1 university, largely in Information and data management. 

I'm a fan of RAID-1 systems for casual home use. They're simple, self-managing, and you can use any drive that's been in a RAID-1 setup directly as a source drive for recovery, even out of the RAID-1 system. 

RAID-1 uses a pair of drives, and simply mirrors anything coming in to both drives, creating identical copies on two drives. 

I'm not a fan of SSD drives for long-term archiving. They're just too spooky; there's no "there" there. With spinning drives there's a physical "something" that's storing data, that is, physical magnetic media. The SSD method of capturing bits as charge states is wicked fast, but it's just too intangible for my brain to trust for the long haul. 

That might be a silly luddite presumption on my part. But I *know magnetic media can remain stable for decades with proper storage. 

We've really set ourselves up by going all-digital. A well-processed monochrome negative or print is inherently archival and should last centuries with proper handling and storage. Color negatives and prints come with issues relating to the stability of dyes over time and with exposure to light; pigment-based prints are more stable. 

But we've basically committed ourselves to migrating data from aging drive to new drive, every 3 to 5 years, forever, or lose it all.

Only time will tell how well we do.

Edited June 2 by DadDadDaddyo
typo

[Crem]

20 minutes ago, DadDadDaddyo said:

Separating backup and processing platforms is a good practice. 

I worked over 20 years at an R1 university, largely in Information and data management. 

I'm a fan of RAID-1 systems for casual home use. They're simple, self-managing, and you can use any drive that's been in a RAID-1 setup directly as a source drive for recovery, even out of the RAID-1 system. 

RAID-1 uses a pair of drives, and simply mirrors anything coming in to both drives, creating identical copies on two drives. 

I'm not a fan of SSD drives for long-term archiving. They're just too spooky; there's no "there" there. With spinning drives there's a physical "something" that's storing data, that is, physical magnetic media. The SSD method of capturing bits as charge states is wicked fast, but it's just too intangible for my brain to trust for the long haul. 

That might be a silly luddite presumption on my part. But I *know magnetic media can remain stable for decades with proper storage. 

We've really set ourselves up by going all-digital. A well-processed monochrome negative or print is inherently archival and should last centuries with proper handling and storage. Color negatives and prints come with issues relating to the stability of dyes over time and with exposure to light; pigment-based prints are more stable. 

But we've basically committed ourselves to migrating data from aging drive to new drive, every 3 to 5 years, forever, or lose it all.

Only time will tell how well we do.

You probably don’t need to use new drives every 3 to 5 years. It should be enough to fully refresh the magnetic fields on the drives by doing a full copy from one drive to another drive in that time period. I have been debating adding parity files to all of my archived images just to deal with any possibility of bit-rot. It would definitely inflate the amount of storage I need but again I do suspect keeping an archive for one’s entire life involves dealing with the fundamentals of physics on spinning media. 

[LeicaGuyUK]

22 hours ago, DadDadDaddyo said:

Separating backup and processing platforms is a good practice. 

I worked over 20 years at an R1 university, largely in Information and data management. 

I'm a fan of RAID-1 systems for casual home use. They're simple, self-managing, and you can use any drive that's been in a RAID-1 setup directly as a source drive for recovery, even out of the RAID-1 system. 

RAID-1 uses a pair of drives, and simply mirrors anything coming in to both drives, creating identical copies on two drives. 

I'm not a fan of SSD drives for long-term archiving. They're just too spooky; there's no "there" there. With spinning drives there's a physical "something" that's storing data, that is, physical magnetic media. The SSD method of capturing bits as charge states is wicked fast, but it's just too intangible for my brain to trust for the long haul. 

That might be a silly luddite presumption on my part. But I *know magnetic media can remain stable for decades with proper storage. 

We've really set ourselves up by going all-digital. A well-processed monochrome negative or print is inherently archival and should last centuries with proper handling and storage. Color negatives and prints come with issues relating to the stability of dyes over time and with exposure to light; pigment-based prints are more stable. 

But we've basically committed ourselves to migrating data from aging drive to new drive, every 3 to 5 years, forever, or lose it all.

Only time will tell how well we do.

Some true words there

And this is why I also vault off to an LTO8. Indefinate media retention is almost impossible but tape is pretty much the longest choice we have left!

[FranzK60]

Same Problem here. I subscribed to Lightroom and after the last update Lightroom Classic is also part of the subscription. Although Lightroom itself allows working with locally stored files. I now use LRC and store files on a working SSD and an backup SSD. On top of that I set up in LRC a synchro folder to synchronize selected pictures in order to have access to them on my mobile devices.

[marchyman]

On 6/2/2025 at 7:17 AM, Photoworks said:

My archive is about 125TB of data, they are on NAS and backed up to other spinning drives.
I am using SmugSmug to deliver images to clients and to keep a backup of all my JPGs. it can store RAW's but it is more money.

Most backup solutions are not affordable online with this data.

If you pay for amazon prime you get unlimited photo storaged using amazon photos.  I use that as the "off site" portion of my image backup plan.  Photos, not video.   There is still the "cost" of the amount of time needed to upload. I wonder how many months it would take to upload that much data.

[rxj]

I have portable 4TB SSD's which I backup on "YYYY.MM.DDD Name" (Samsung T7 / T9 have been the most reliable without issues).

Then have a backup mirrored to another SSD (for speed and redundancy).

Every 6 months will then transfer to NAS (HDDs) for longer term storage.

Learned the hard way with it only on one drive and not backing up regularly.

In my M11-P I have 128GB SD card and then the internal storage if need be.

Edited June 3 by rxj

[Photoworks]

just keep in mind that SSDs are not a long-term storage solution. the charge of bits needs to be powered every 6 months to keep data intact.

[Photoworks]

12 hours ago, marchyman said:

If you pay for amazon prime you get unlimited photo storaged using amazon photos.  I use that as the "off site" portion of my image backup plan.  Photos, not video.   There is still the "cost" of the amount of time needed to upload. I wonder how many months it would take to upload that much data.

I used to run it on Backblaze initially, it took 1 year on Fios.

since I got NAS, Backblaze is no longer a flat rate option.

I have been using SmugMug for over 10 years, to upload of daily jobs is quick with jpg's

 

[ELAN]

12 hours ago, Photoworks said:

just keep in mind that SSDs are not a long-term storage solution. the charge of bits needs to be powered every 6 months to keep data intact.

That's no longer the conventional wisdom.  Modern SSDs, especially TLC 3D NAND like the popular WD_Black SN850X NVMe can retain data at least 3 to 5 years when relatively new.  See latest research here:

https://storedbits.com/ssd-data-retention-period-without-power/

And if you pair the SN850X with the OWC Express 1M2 box you get one of the fastest external drives on the planet. Look it up on Amazon.

Edited June 4 by ELAN

[ApoVision]

Have everything on external drives:2 OWC Express 4M2 with 4x4tb jbod each, 2 16tb hdd. 1 hdd stored in safe, 10km from my house, swapped at least once a month. Use carbon copy cloner to do copy jobs. Jbod runs at almost 3,000MB/s which is also ok for 60MB dngs

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[Derbyshire Man]

I didn't realise that about powered done SSD's!

My regime is 3x 4tb SSD's for immediate storage backed up locally to a 14gb hard disc connected to the same machine, continuously backed up to a NAS in a separate part of the house. So at least three copies of everything. Also as I go I make regular back up discs on HD of a suitable capacity as drives fill.