It's A Digital Disease!

The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Wise_Order_1196 on 2024-08-14 23:21:44.

I have many TB of photos managed by Lightroom. I noticed during backups that very old photos that I hadn't edited in years were changed (different hash, different binary contents), leading to them being backed up during rsync. Upon doing a binary diff, it turned out that while the photos hadn't visibly changed, Lightroom likes to randomly rewrite and update photo metadata inside DNG's for example, even when just browsing photos and not performing any edits.

For this reason it's best to keep photo folders that you no longer edit as read-only. I only keep new photos as writeable, everything else is read-only.