I didn’t need any recovery, but this process compresses the catalogue. I had initially been searching for something to fix a noticeable performance decrease after I had tagged several hundred of my 6,000 photos. This technique reduced the size of my catalog from 400MB to 20MB! The organizer now works smoothly again.

Now I’m investigating rsync and duplicity …

Thanks for your help!

To back stuff up to rsync.net, I have installed the Windows rsync client called cwrsync. It’s worked great for me on both XP and Vista.

You can find the installer on SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=69227&package_id=68081

I then set up a bat file (based on the example included in the install) that will sync certain files and directories with my rsync.net account. I also set up a trusted key on the rsync.net server so I don’t need to log in when I run the .bat file. In theory, I could schedule a process to run the backup, but I still do it manually at the moment. I don’t want to risk overwriting a good image with a bad image.

Here are the instructions from rsync.net to set up the client the way I have it:

http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/windows_rsync.html

Rsync is great because it will compare a file and send only the changed bits, not upload the whole file again. This saves time and bandwidth. For example, I have an encrypted TrueCrypt volume I sync, and instead of uploading the volume every time, rsync will only update the bits of the file that are different. Pretty nice.