Aperture Vault Question

Okay, so I am looking to simplify my photo storage process, as I recently got Photoshop and am going to be doing more and more editing and what not.
I also have Aperture that I back up using its vault feature on my external hard drive, creating two locations for all my pictures - within Aperture and the vault on my external hard drive. Is it necessary (aka, would it be a good idea) to keep the original pictures in my home folder/pictures folder? I am hoping to free up space if not necessary.
Also, I would probably end up burning the master images to a DVD from Aperture for a third back up. I may sound paranoid about this, but I don't want to lose anything.
I'm just looking for an easy back-up process for my photos.
Thanks!
Josh

Also, I would probably end up burning the master images to a DVD from Aperture for a third back up. I may sound paranoid about this, but I don't want to lose anything. I'm just looking for an easy back-up process for my photos.
You do not sound paranoid, just prudent. The essence of competent digital photography is multiple redundant backup.
Your Managed-Masters-Library and Vault workflow is fine now but only in the short term because hard drives slow as they fill and using a Managed-Masters Library image files will sooner or later overfill the internal hard drive unless completed Projects with Masters are constantly purged from Aperture but that is inappropriate workflow for most photogs, and the benefits of using a Managed-Masters workflow are minimal.
I recommend to Manage by Reference with Master image files stored on external hard drives. Especially important for iMacs and laptops with a single internal drive. The workflow as described below uses a Referenced-Masters Library.
I feel pretty strongly that card-to-Aperture or even camera-to-Aperture handling of original images puts originals at unnecessary risk. I suggest this workflow, first using the Finder (not Aperture) to copy images from CF card to computer hard drive:
• Remove the memory card from the camera and insert it into a memory card reader. Faster readers and faster cards are preferable.
• Finder-copy images from memory card to a labeled folder on the intended permanent Masters location hard drive.
• Eject memory card.
• Burn backup hard drive or DVD copies of the original images (optional recommended backup step).
• Eject backup hard drive(s) or DVDs.
• From within Aperture, import images from the hard drive folder into Aperture selecting "Store files in their current location." This is called "referenced images." During import is the best time to also add keywords, but that is another discussion.
• Review pix for completeness (e.g. a 500-pic shoot has 500 valid images showing in Aperture).
• Reformat memory card in camera, and archive originals off site on hard drives and/or on DVDs.
Note that the "eject" steps above are important in order to avoid mistakenly working on removable media/backups.
Also note with a Referenced-Masters Library that use of the "Vault" backup routine backs up the Library only, not the Masters. Masters should be separately backed up, IMO a good thing from a workflow and data security standpoint.
External drives that are not eSATA (or at least FW800) decrease speed, so your Aperture Library should stay on the internal drive.
When using Referenced Masters the Library does not actually hold the large Master images themselves. That way even a laptop drive can hold an Aperture Library of 100,000 images by referencing Master images that live on external drives. To store Master images by "Reference," in Aperture when you go to Import on the right hand side of the import window you must select "Store files in their current location."
Note that by sizing Previews carefully (I suggest creating Previews manually and only during down time, and sizing to the pixel dimensions of the laptop display) all images can always be viewed on the laptop even when the Masters are off-line.
Good luck!
-Allen Wicks

Similar Messages

Yet another Time Capsule /Time Machine / Aperture / Vault Question

OK - It is recommended that the Aperture Library be excluded from the Time Machine backups, and to create vaults instead. Fine.
Has anyone tried including the vaults instead of the library in their TM backups? Any issues? Does TM backup only the changes to the vault, or does it see the vault file as one file, and backup the whole thing after the vault has been updated?

I haven't experienced it personally. That's because I have my Aperture library excluded -- I'm using SuperDuper to clone the entire library once a week (Aperture isn't open when this happens), and I also use vaults.
There were numerous threads here about it, though. Or, I should say, they were in this forum, or they were in the Leopard/Time Machine forum. There was a fair bit of complaining about it... so I take it that some people have been affected.
I doubt there's any danger of data loss, given TM won't back up the Aperture library when it's open -- which is when the database is in use and there could be open journal files. But... if you try it, and you notice that TM is taking 2-3 hours of crunching on your drive to back up the whole library, don't come yelling to me. I'll just say "known issue" and point to the Kbase article.
Deal?

Aperture 3.2.1: vault questions

Core Duo Processor; OS 10.6.8
I have Time Machine backing things up on my HD, but the Aperture Vault is on an external HD.
Like many of you, I had to revert to version 3.1.3 when version 3.2 kept crashing. One problem I saw while I was still attempting to use version 3.2, in addition to the crashes, was that I could no longer access the vault because the photos there were created by an earlier version of Aperture - version 3.1.3.
Can anyone answer one - or all - of these questions:
1. Will the content of the vault automatically be upgraded if I try version 3.2.1?
2. If not, can I use the 'update vault' function in Aperture to upgrade the photos in the vault? or
3. Would I have to delete the current library on the vault, create a new one, and rename it?

Update:
Since a few people had read the post but no one had an answer, I decided to bite the bullet and try the new upgrade.
I am happy to report that all is well with version 3.2.1. All I had to do after the download and installation finished was to open Aperture and update the vault from the HUD.
To be on the safe side, I repaired permissions and verifed the disk on the partition dedicated to Aperture vault on the external HD, then restarted.
Aperture is behaving as it should.

Backup Storage - Aperture Vault versus Time Machine versus daily SuperDuper

What value does dumping the Aperture library to an Aperture Vault give in addition to running Time Machine to one drive and a daily SuperDuper copy to a second drive with irregular SuperDuper copies to an external drive that can be removed from the machine room.

SImon,
Vault and Time Machine address different needs. Probably you will want to have both.
The advantage of Time Machine: incremental backups of previous versions, very compact storage. And you can integrate it into your regular backup of the whole system and include the regular masters as well. But the disadvantage: Time Machine decides for you, what will be deleted, if the backup drives get full. You do not have control over what will be saved and what not from the previous versions.
The advantage of vaults: You can make full backups of your library for well defined moments in time - snapshots of important states. I'd create a vault, whenever I make a major upgrade of the system at least.
Is there anyway of cancelling a stuck Vault update other than the sledgehammer approach of Force Quit?
If the graphical user interface is unresponsive, like when updating a vault, you can use the Terminal to send the "termination signal" to Aperture: Sometimes this will succeed, even if the "Quit" button does not work:
Look for the Process ID of Aperture in the Activity Monitor (launch Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor" and click the CPU heading. This will bring Aperture close to the top of the list. Make a note of the PID number in the first column, in this case 66550.
Launch a Terminal window and enter the following command:
kill -TERM 66550 (insert Aperture's PID instead of 66550)
This will send the "Software Termination Signal - TERM to Aperture, the same as pressing the "Quit" button should do, but send it directly, and not from the GUI that is unresponsive. This way I always succeded in cancelling a vaul update without force quitting. Not all processes can be terminated this way, however. The Terminal.app is also in the Applications > Utilities folder.
Regards
Léonie

Aperture Vault and Time Machine

Does anyone know how this will operate ?
Will the Aperture Vault be TM 'unaware' ?
Roger

I guess there'll be a new 'vault' mechanism, as TM backs up your hard drive and vaults typically reside on another drive. whether or not TM can work with other drive I don't know.
Perhaps vaults will remain largely unchanged and be used for recovering entire projects or libraries, and TM will allow you to go back through previous version of the current file, or restore individual images that you may have deleted.
Regards
Steve

Folder labeled "Images Removed from Aperture Vault #1"

Hi all,
I was just looking at everything that's on the External Hard Drive on which I have my Aperture Vault. There's another folder on that EHD labeled "Images Removed from Aperture Vault #1." Noodling through that folder, it seems to be every master that I've deleted, broken down my year, month, and even day.
Is this normal behavior? Can I delete all those sub-folders, etc.? Should I keep the folder itself? Did I somehow set this up initally?
Anyhoo, thank you all for any suggestions.

Yes it is a normal but unreported feature. When you run the vault command the vault created is a snapshot of the current state of the library. If there is a previous vault for this library then images that are in the vault but no longer in the library are moved to the folder you referred to.
If you are certain you do not want any of those images anymore you an delete them.
regard

Can't create Aperture vault on my new 1 Terrabyte Hard Disk

Just bought two new Maxtor 1 terrabyte harddisks to back-up my Aperture vault,
my Aperture Library is now about 450 Gb. When I'm making a new vault on the new hard-disk, wich takes several hours, my G5 will "colapse" after a few hours, the whole system is stuck and the only way to get out is too get the power of.
When I restart and look at the disk I see that about 250 GB has been transported, I tried this several times and it's always stuck at about the same point. Also when I'm dragging the Aperture-file to the new disk, the same thing happens.
When I do the same thing to a Maxtor 500 GB disk everything worls fine.
Does anybody have a clue ? Thanks in advance !
With kind regards
Albert Brunsting

It could be that the 1TB drive is heating up and shutting down after turning for several hours causing the system to lockup. Might try adding a cooling fan pointed at the external HD.
One alternative is to reduce the library size. Export projects from that large library into another empty one until both are about equal in size. Then back up each library individually onto the external HD.

Time Capsule, Aperture Vault, Folders

I'm considering acquiring a Time Capsule to replace my WD NAS, which is clunky, unreliable, and absurdly slow. My Aperture library seems to constantly become corrupted by my using the NAS both for Time Machine backups and as a duplicate stoarge place for my Vault.
I understand a TC will allow me to backup using Time Machine. But will it also allow me to set up seperate folders, one for an Aperture Vault, and another for storing documents or other material outside of my Mac's hard drive? I also backup incrementally using Superduper and a portanle USB HD. Does anyone know if I could do additional Superduper incremental backups onto a TC? (That's a lot of backing up, I know, but I'm paranoid about losing my stuff)
OSX 10.9.1
Aperture 3.5.1

The TC will have exactly the same issues as the WD NAS.. it is designed specifically for Time Machine.
Constant corruption of a library is due to network disconnections which over wireless are to be expected.. wireless is not a reliable media for holding open files.
You can use the TC to mix files and backups..
See Q3 here.
http://pondini.org/TM/Time_Capsule.html
But I don't see you getting any further down the road to reliable use than you have now.

Aperture vault with no mother library - how do i update it?

hello. i had an aperture library i created for a project. when i was done with the project i created an aperture vault on an external drive. but stupidly i deleted the actual library that created the vault.
now i have a 50g vault on a drive and i need to get back into the library.
when i try and open the vault, it says the vault was created with an older version of aperture and it needs to be updated. but i can't update it. i can't figure out how to even get aperture to recognize the vault at all... what to do?

Simple, effective answer: Yes, make copies of your Libraries as back-ups and don't use the Vault feature.
Vaults are no more than a back-up created from within Aperture. (I suspect Apple added this feature on the assumption that users of Aperture did not regularly back up their data.) They can be problematic (they can also be problem-free). If you are comfortable with Finder or with a program such as SuperDuper or CCC, use it and don't bother with Vaults. (That's what I do, and that's what other top posters here do as well.)
As far as data back-up goes, I recommend that all users maintain at all time three copies of their data. A working copy, a copy of the working copy that gets regularly updated (no less than once a day, unless the data is unchanged), and another copy of the working copy that is kept off-site. Never have all three copies in the same physical location (don't bring your off-site copy on-site. Take your on-site copy off-site, and then bring the off-site copy on-site, effectively swapping them while never having all three copies in the same location).
As for making on Library for each project ... it is generally not recommended. One of the great empowerments of Aperture is that it functions as an index of all the work it contains. I have _every photo I've ever taken_ in my personal Library. I can search my entire oevre. Your needs may be different -- and may be different enough that making one Library for each project you do is sensible -- but using separate Libraries takes the power of this global indexing away. (Fwiw, the reasons I can think of having separate Libraries: image security, image quarantine, multiple photographers, and Libraries of images where the photographer is not important.)
HTH,
--Kirby.
(Sent from my magic glass.)

Is there a need for Aperture Vaults if I'm using Time Machine and/or SuperDuper?

Hey all
What's the benefit of Aperture Vaults if I'm using Time Machine or SuperDuper for my regular backups?
John

John,
Aperture vaults are snapshots of a certain moment. So you can create a collections of vaults saved at specific intervalls, say one each year, or before you upgrade your system. If you keep your older vaults, you will be able to restore images from many years back. If your library is huge, you may only notice years later that an important image got corrupted.
Time machine backups are very convenient and you can go back in time easily, but you can never be sure, how much back in time your backup will go. You have no control over which older versions will be deleted, when TM runs out of space.
Clones are great, i.e. if you create bootable clones. This way you will be able to revert to a previous system without reinstalling. With respect to Aperture libraries cloning your library will give you the same benefits as vaults.
My experience tells me, that a mixture is good. If you can, keep three backups, and not all in the same place.
I keep one backup at my office and two at home. I have a bootable clone, a TimeMachine backup, and occasionally create a new vault. My most important images are in my dropbox and synced to all my macs.
regards
Léonie

Aperture vault is freezing at 50% when updating!

I really need help on this! My aperture vault only seems to freeze and the progress bar is stuck at about 50%. I have to force quit aperture when this happens. I tried to make a new vault on a noter external disk. It is no help. I have a very powerful iMac. i7 SSD only one year old. Aperture version 3.3. The external disk is formated Mac OS Extended (journalført - norwegian Lion 10.7.4).
This is bothering me very!!!!
Someone!?

Hi,
If you have followed all the methods mentioned in "Aperture 3: Troubleshooting Basics" http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3805?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US (repair and rebuild etc.) then I would advice to wait and let it work longer. It may seem to get stuck but if you wait (not 5 minutes but 5 or 20 hours) it may go through.
I have already had years issue that taking Vault backup takes tens of hours. I have tried all tricks mentioned in this forum (if you search you should find 20-30 threads about Vault being slow, freezing etc.). Everybody here knows better and says that it should not take that long and will advice you to do this and that, but if you look at those 20-30 threads not even half have resolution for the person who had the issue.
I'm backing up the library instead, from SSD to HD it takes 15 minutes with CCC (block copy including verify), and faster from SSD to SSD. Here is thread I opened to ask if this is OK:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/18877353#18877353
Best Regards,
Samuli

Aperture vault is full

Aperture Vaults.
Aperture 3.3.2
I have a 500gb vault that is now full, if I install another 500gb vault, will aperture continue to updated the new vault with my additional data or will it just fill that with all the original data then tell me that’s full?
Thanks.

Pharaoh,
Unless there are other things on the disk that you can move/delete then you have 3 options: (1) Get a larger drive, set it up inside Aperture and back up to it. This approach will take some time as going to a new drive will require Aperture to back up everything rather than just incremental changes (which is what it does normally). (2) Split your libraries into 2 or more and back the new one up to another (new) drive. (3) Don't use a vault as a backup. NOT recommended. A 1 TB drive is no more or less likely to fail than say a 500MB (assuming equal quality in manufacturing). Aperture vaults do not know how to "span" more than one drive - so far as I can tell.
Personally, I use two work drives (that only contain the library) and alternate between them for increased performance. One library will of course be behind the other at any given moment but has everything from the last overwrite. No matter which drive I work from, they both backup to the same vault drive.
To be honest, high performance large capacity drives have become quite affordable. I consider using 3 drives in this manner to provide a reasonable level of security without going into RAID or other solutions.
HTH
Robert

Aperture vault on WD MyCloud NAS

Has anyone succeeded in creating an Aperture 3 vault on a WD MyCloud NAS? I have a new 3TB NAS and when I try to create an Aperture vault from Aperture it writes about 120 GB and then hangs. This has happened repeatedly. The total size of the library is 700 GB. Is this a disk format issue? I believe the NAS is NTFS and can't be changed.

I just purchased a WD My Cloud but before cutting the shrink wrap did a check on Aperture compatability. Luckily I found this and other posts. It seems that WD have created their own file system for this and similar drives!
"The Western Digital units mentioned above [eg My Cloud] use a proprietary file system and cannot be reformatted as FAT32, NTFS, or a Mac File System."
That means no HFS+ so expect, at the least, file name issues when trying to write to the drive, and loss of other niceties like iPhoto/Aperture compatibility. So its back to the shop with this one.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1391/~/reformatting-a-wd-nas-dri ve-as-fat32,-ntfs,-or-a-mac-file-system
See also the comments here: http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Western-Digital-My-Cloud-Review/?page=4
"Great idea, but not Mac OS ready...."

Aperture vault

I've been updating my monthly Aperture vault for 48 hrs and it seems to be 2/3 finished, but I see no action in past 24 hrs. I have close to 100 K pictures. How long will it take?

Blackbelly wrote:
I'm curious, Andy, how/where you do backup your Aperture pictures? I'd love an easier way to do it because my backup did end last evening after 60 hrs! No, there was no option to cancel because the spinning beachball hovered over every part of Aperture's face. Literally force-quitting was the only thing to do. I think I have my vault going to an external harddrive which is part of my time-machine, but not sure because my son set it up for me.
Rick, I use a MacBook Pro retina with limited internal drive space, so I have only the library on the internal drive, and all the images are referenced and stored on an external drive. The internal is backed up to time machine over wifi. The external image folder is backed up to my time capsure (to a data partition) using an App called Sync Two Folders.
My backup process is geared around my travelling, during which my internal library is also likely to contain managed images taken during the trip. If it's a short trip, I'm only concerned with new images, so I'll just backup new images by exporting the project as a new library to an external drive (and sometimes a USB stick).
For longer trips, where I'm likely to do a lot of editing and organising, I have an extra drive which I keep current using Sync Two Folders. This has a bootable partition which is a clone of my internal, and a data partition which is a clone of my referenced images.
Sync Two Folders is really quick and efficient at just updating changes to keep things current, but like all sync software it can be dangerous if you give it the wrong settings.
Andy

Aperture vaults - setting up new computer with vault

Hi there.
I have a MacBook with a large aperture vault on a separate hard drive. I have now bought a new iMac. Can I use the vault from my Macbook to set up all my photos on my new machine, thereby saving me hours of work. HELP
Di from Devon

Yes, you can restore Aperture to another Mac from a Vault. Just do not expect it to be quick.
-Allen Wicks
From the manual:
Restoring Your Aperture System
If you buy a new computer or use another system at a different location and want
access to the Aperture library, you can install Aperture and then transfer the library
from your vault (on your backup disk) to the other computer. If you experience
equipment failure or other unexpected events, such as fire or weather-related damage
to your equipment, you can easily restore the entire library to your new computer from
a backup disk.
To restore the entire library from an external backup disk:
1 Connect the hard disk drive that contains the most up-to-date vault to your computer
and open Aperture.
2 Choose File > Vault > Restore Library.
The Restore Library dialog appears.
3 Choose Select Source Vault from the Source Vault pop-up menu.
4 Navigate to the vault from which you want to restore, then click Select.
5 Choose Select Destination from the Library Destination pop-up menu.
6 Navigate to the location where you want to place the library, then click Select.
7 Click Restore, then click Restore again.

Aperture Vault Question

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for