Sidecars
TL;DR: If you use Adobe Lightroom, enable "sidecar" aka XMP files. It will store a portable modification log next to each picture file.
Windows 10 recently managed to force a huge and hugely fatal update on me. It failed miserably. And then it failed to recover. I spent weeks trying to rescue it, and learned two things: There is next to no feedback from Windows as to what is wrong, and some of its "recovery tools" will matters worse; somewhere along the way it managed to take with it a few folders in the Users folder.
It wasn't the end of the wrong. I was already dual booting a Linux Mint and I had offloaded most data to another partition. I really only used Windows for gaming and for photos, mainly using Adobe Lightroom. The rest had long ago moved to Linux.
But it is amazing how much the "rest", that Linux excels at, feels like work!
As matters stand, I have all my photos, but I managed to loose all post processing with Adobe Lightroom. And it needn't have been this way, because I after the fact realized, what I should have done:
I should have enabled XMP metadata aka. "sidecar" files.
XMP aka. Extensible Metadata Platform is a standard pioneered by Adobe for storing extra metadata about pictures. For proprietary file formats like raw files, Lightroom will store the the information is a file next to the picture file with extension ".xmp" - a so called "sidecar" file. For formats that allows for this kind of data, Lightroom will store it in the file (beware that this will likely go for exported files as well, so you might share more than you bargained for).
This will make backups easier, as the metadata is next to the photo, and instead of loosing an entire database worth of metadata in one go due to disk corruption, the loss will likely be isolated to a few photos.
Not all information goes into the sidecar files, so you will still need to backup your catalog database in Lightroom. But I would sure wished I had enabled sidecar files before the fatal Windows update.
Anyway, as much as I love Adobe Lightroom, I have decided to go for the open source alternative darktable - I'll write a post about it later. It uses XMP files too.