Today’s Question: Is there a way in Photoshop to save a PSD file to two locations at once, one on the computer and one on an external backup drive? I currently save to the computer and then copy/paste to the backup drive.
Tim’s Quick Answer: There is not an option to automatically save to two locations at once in Photoshop. I recommend considering a backup solution such as GoodSync (https://www.timgreyphoto.com/goodsync) to help streamline the process of maintaining a backup of your photos.
More Detail: When you save an image in Photoshop, you’re only able to save a single copy of the file at one time. You could conceivably use the Save As command twice to save the image in two different locations, but I strongly recommend against this approach. Manually saving twice creates a risk that you may not save the master image with the latest updates and creates the potential for confusion about which file is the true primary file, even though you’re saving to two different drives.
My preference in this type of scenario would be to use software such as GoodSync (https://www.timgreyphoto.com/goodsync) to create a backup job for this purpose. For example, if you’re saving the master PSD files to the Pictures folder, you could define a job in GoodSync that causes the Pictures folder on the internal hard drive to be backed up to a “Pictures Backup” folder on an external hard drive. You would just need to be sure to set the destination for the backup as a folder, not simply the external drive, because the latter would cause the contents of the drive to be replaced with only the Pictures folder.
You could also employ a RAID solution (Redundant Array of Independent Drives), which can provide automatic redundancy for all files saved to an appropriately configured RAID drive. However, while this provides an automatic solution that operates in real time, it doesn’t create a separate copy of your photos that you can access directly independent of the RAID configuration.
You can learn how to put GoodSync to use in your workflow for backing up your photos and other important data with my video course “Backing Up with GoodSync”, with more information on the GreyLearning website here:
https://www.greylearning.com/courses/goodsync
