It’s probably not a thing anymore.

Not all NICs are VLAN capable AFAIK.

But as another Redditor mentioned, being new to this and virtualising your only/main router sounds like a headache waiting to happen.

Capacitor fluid does not smell pleasant. 😁

I would keep one ‘proper’ server, 3-5 SFF machines for cluster labs and such.

One of the SFF could be a decent 24/7 production machine with light Proxmox duties or something similar.

It was (is?) common to also have multiple libraries. Like a temp library, could be used on imports for example. A done library for client jobs completed. A personal library etc.

Unless LR have changed, there’s built in tools to move and manage the db <-> file relationship.

There used to also be tools to prune/trim the db.

The root of the problem might her workflow. Especially when shooting series, when she’s back/at the computer, immediately go through the photos and delete whatever’s out of focus/uninteresting/etc.

Maybe she’s good at the workflow? I know how tedious it is to sit down and sort out a huge archive like that.

I used LR for a long time, but got tired of backing up and managing the files. I moved to iCloud and I’m happy with that.

The Apple Photos program is extremely basic, but it’s a decent way of rough organising photos.

Using tags/project/etc. is important.

As for folder structure, I used (year) - (month) (day). That with at least some basic tags made it manageable.

Some data are backed up to a local NAS, some of that data is backed up to cloud (not Google or the big ones).

Most of my data aren’t important. Photo library is both local, in the cloud, and most on offsite DVDs.

~45K lossless music files is local and cloud. Those would suck losing, but I could rip them again.

I’ve been considering tape backup again, it’s like 20 years since I used it at home.

You’ll have to provide cool air to the room as well. No amount of extraction will help if you don’t do that.

I’d think many of us have large amounts of mostly idle cores. 🙂

If I were to start from scratch, I’d pick something power efficient first.