Thursday, January 26, 2012

Easily backup Aperture Library with a Vault

Based on my personal experience, I don't trust hard disks anymore, so in order to avoid any loss of data, I try to keep everything safely backed up.
As I use a Mac to organize and edit my photos, I'll try to explain how I easily back up my entire Aperture Library, using an Aperture feature called Vault.
A Vault allows you to incrementally back up, not only your master images, but all the work you’ve done in Aperture: such as projects, keywords,  ratings and especially image adjustments.

Creating a Vault is very easy: just go to the File menu and select Vault -> Add Vault...

Now comes the most difficult task: choose a suitable location for your Vault:
- Please don't put it in you local hard drive, because if it will broke up, you'll loose both the Aperture Library and the Vault :)
- Choose a location on an external hard drive, but don't keep il togheter with your Mac. I leave to your imagination what happen if you keep your laptop and your external hard drive in the same bag... and you lost the bag!
- You can also choose a remote location, such as a shared folder on another computer.

Once you have chosen your safest location, a new Vault will appear on the bottom of the Library tab. A red circular icon will appear next to the new Vault: you can use it to synchronize your vault with your Library.
When the Vault will be fully up to date, the button will turn to black.


WARNING: Updating vaults cannot be canceled and it prevents you from working in
Aperture. So prepare yourself to a break :)

If you need to restore your Aperture Library from a Vault,  just go again to the File menu and select Vault -> Restore Library...  and follow some easy steps!

Hope these few tips are helpful and remember to synchronize your Vault once in a while :)

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