Restoring Aperture Database from Vault a Nightmare

Question

When my Aperture HD went south with the database of 90,000 images I imediately bought another 1.5 TB drive and started the restore from the Vault expecting to be able to use Aperture as before. It took 24 hours to restore the database. Now I can go back to work I thought. NO. Every Aperture thumbnail in every album has to rebuild when you want to use it. So the smooth experience of using my original database is now a nightmare of stop and go and wait for a rebuild. So the Vault is really is only a partial solution to an Aperture backup. This is totally not an acceptable solution for someone running a business.
Has anyone found any better solutions or has anyone experienced a rebuild of a large database?
Thanks,
Stan
G5 dual processor   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

Answer 1

When my Aperture HD went south with the database of
90,000 images I imediately bought another 1.5 TB
drive and started the restore from the Vault
expecting to be able to use Aperture as before. It
took 24 hours to restore the database. Now I can go
back to work I thought. NO. Every Aperture thumbnail
in every album has to rebuild when you want to use
it. So the smooth experience of using my original
database is now a nightmare of stop and go and wait
for a rebuild.
One way to make that go smoother is to go in turn to each project in Aperture and click on it - that will force Aperture to try and see all files and in turn start rebuilding all of the thumbnails for that project. I think you just need to click, wait a second or two for Aperture to catch on, and then you can click on another project - then you can resume using images in albums after and it'll not be doing a thumbnail rebuild per image.
A few longer term solutions if you'd like never to have that problem again:
1) Mirrored drives. If you have mirrored drives and one drive dies, you still have one left. You'd still need to do vaults on yet another drive as mirroring is not really the same as a backup (it replicates mistakes as well as work), but it would make it much less likley you'd need to use the vault.
2) Backup library. If you really want to also backup the thumbnails then either manually backing up the whole library or just stuff within the library would work. If you export projects I believe it also strips the thumbnails but if you just go into the Aperture library and copy them out it keeps everything.