The quickest way to backup to a second HDD would probably be a scheduled job running in the background. e.g. I use SyncBackSE for all my validated transfers. If you read The DAM Book it is even advisable to let software like this copy/move files between HDD because it can verify the files are a bit for bit copy of the original files.

But taking the question at face value there is no way to force Lightroom’s export to copy to multiple destinations, or to maintain part or all of the folder structure when writing to disk. The export dialog always assumes you are writing to a single directory or the original directory the file existed in.

Some plugins do exist (e.g. Tree Exporter) that try to work around these limitations. YMMV. I’ve considered adding some of this functionality to Export Backup but that has been put on the back burner for the moment. One other possible change I’ve considered is allowing more than one Export Backup post process action to be included in a single export dialog. You could then write to both HDD at once though that would still be to a single output directory.

Hope this helps.

i’ve run into a problem though – i’m trying to find a way to archive shots from each of my jobs to 2 separate external hard drives in 1 click.

i’ve managed to work out how to do this by re-importing all of the files i’ve processed back into lightroom & then in the export dialogue window having the “file settings” tab locked to process the files as “original”, thereby copying them across to 1 external drive without changing the original file format. i’ve then set your “export back up” location to copy the same files to the other external drive. this works fine & that’s great, except for the following issue:

having re-imported those files into lightroom so that the catalog includes files i’ve retouched in photoshop, as well as storyboards i’ve created; when i run this plug in, it won’t recognise the individual folders & sub folders i’ve created & therefore throws everything into the one folder. although this is better than nothing, i’d rather be able to archive individual files into the subfolders i’d created for them.

is there any way of forcing the lightroom export process to recognise individual folders & sub folders when processing & archiving?

thanks in advance,

craig

The uncompressed directory needs to be set to where the Lightroom inbuilt catalog backups end up. The plugin will then copy or move (depending upon the settings) those backups to zips in the compressed files directory. You must call up the plugin (via one of its items in the File -> Plugin Extras menu) to trigger the compression of backups. Adobe hasn’t documented any SDK hook to allow me to do this without user intervention.

Hope this clears everything up.

I have installed the latest config backup plugin for LR2 and I was wondering…
Should I have both the Configuration files backup and the LightRoom Automatic backup set configured to save to the same folder on my External HD?

Does the LightRoom Automatic backup save to both a compressed and an uncompressed directory or is compression a feature of your plugin? If so does your plug-in automatically compress the files or must it be set to do so?

Thanks.