Greswolde Photography Commercial Blog – Photographer in Wolverhampton, West Midlands. Videographer.

Joseph - Can you elaborate any more on what or where you heard this? It’s news to me, and if it’s true I’d love to dig into it more.

I advise people to use an online cloud backup like Backblaze and if there’s a risk of corruption on backup, that’s something to learn about.

thanks
-Joseph

John Smith - This is incorrect.

Time Machine will back up your Aperture library just fine. However, if Aperture is running, then Time Machine will not back up the library itself while Aperture is running. This is to prevent backing up files that are open, perhaps resulting in a corrupted backup. If you are using a managed library, this means Aperture won’t back up the masters either while it’s open. If you are using referenced masters, they will be backed up even while Aperture is running.

When you quit Aperture, Time Machine will back up the changes the next time it runs. Given that Time Machine backs up on an hourly basis, there should be no issues unless Aperture is open 100% of the time you are running your computer.

There were issues between Time Machine and Aperture when 10.5 was first released, but they were resolved over 2 years ago, with Mac OS X 10.5.3:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1878

John Smith - You don’t want to use any backup tool to back up the Aperture library itself while Aperture is running. The SQLite database may not have everything persisted to disk so you could get data in an inconsistent state in the backup.

At no time would there be any issues using any backup utility (Time Machine, ChronoSync, or other) with referenced masters. Those are just files on disk. Your comment “This applies to both managed files as well as referenced files.” is just flat-out incorrect. The original (RAW or JPEG) files themselves are not special in any way, it’s just Aperture’s database files that shouldn’t be backed up while they’re in use. In a managed library, everything is inside the same “package” file but from the OS perspective it’s just a directory, and managed and referenced files themselves are pretty much the same.

xavier - I had a major crash last week and used time machine to restore my system from my 2To time capsule. Since then my Aperture Library is completely corrupted. I tried regenereating the database, repairing authorization etc… The previews are missing from my library and when I try to open the files from Aperture, I get error messages saying that the volume where the files are stored is disconnected, whereas the files are saved on my hard drive in my iphoto library….

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated as I have all my books created with Aperture.

Thanks!
Xavier

Nik Player - I have to say I have never experienced the issue you are talking about. You cannot backup the Library while Aperture is open, it contains a SQLite database. The referenced masters should be fine. In my experience the masters always backup with out issues. Perhaps it is a problem with the version of Chronosync or the fact you are using some sort of RAID to present a 4GB disk as a mount point.