Tuesday, June 15, 2010 at 7:28 PM Aperture 3 Vaults; What’s Backed Up, and What Isn’t?
A user recently asked:
I am realizing that Referenced images are the way to go for my RAW wedding workflow. I don’t know much about Vault. Is this something I use even if my images are Referenced or is this just for Managed images?
Great question. The Vault can be very useful, but as most users already know, if you’re working referenced, then the Vault doesn’t back up your photos. So what good is it?
Turns out, quite a bit.
First Thing’s First… What’s a Vault?
The Vault is Aperture’s own built-in backup system. Once configured, it will back up your library with a single click. This can be in addition to any other backup system you may have, such as Time Machine or a cloud backup system like Backblaze. And you can have as many Vaults as you like, on as many hard drives as you like.
What Does It Back Up?
The Vault will backup everything that’s in your Aperture Library—meaning literally everything in that Library package sitting in your Pictures folder (or wherever it may be). This also means that it will NOT backup anything that’s NOT in this package. So if you’re working Referenced, then the master files will NOT be backed up.
The Aperture Library. If it’s in here, the Vault will back it up!
So what’s left besides the Master files? Lots of things…
- Preview JPEGs and Thumbnails
- Metadata (IPTC; the EXIF is stored in the RAW file, but likely also stored in the Library)
- Projects, Albums, Smart Albums, etc. — i.e. your entire file organization
- Books, Light Tables, Slide Shows, Web Journals and Pages — really, everything you can make in Aperture
Huh? Managed? Referenced? What?
Oh sorry… OK if you’re not familiar with the difference, the easy explanation is that Managed means Aperture is literally managing your Master files for you, which means the actual files that came off of your camera are stored inside the Aperture Library package (that icon up above). Referenced means that Aperture literally references your master files, linking to them from wherever you like. Another hard drive, multiple hard drives, whatever you like.
For a seriously in-depth look at the differences and advantages of each, I encourage you to check out my eBook, “10 Tips on File Management in Aperture 3”.
To Vault or Not to Vault
If you’re working Managed, it’s a no-brainer. Even with other backup systems in place, it’s reassuring to know that quite possibly the most treasured things you have on your computer (your photos!) are backed up more than once. It’s easy, so just do it. Yes you’ll need an additional hard drive to store the Vault on, but that’s a small price to pay for another copy of all of your photos.
Even if you’re working Referenced, it’s still a Good Idea™. Imagine if you lost the entire contents of your primary hard drive, but your photos were on external drives, so they’re OK. Great, you still have all your photos… but years of organization, edits, and more will be gone. So unless the idea of starting over with a pile of 20,000 photos sounds like a nice way to spend your summer, go ahead and run that Vault. It could save you a headache or two down the road.
Setting Up a Vault
It’s very easy to set up the Vault, but unfortunately you still have to remember to run it every once in a while. Hopefully one day we’ll have an automated option, or at least a reminder “hey you haven’t updated your Vault in a few days, can I do that for you? [yes] [no]” but for now you have to remember to trigger it on your own. Here’s how to set it up, and run it.
In the bottom left corner of the Aperture window, you’ll see it says Vault. To the right of that is a little box with a triangle in it—click that to open the Vault drawer.
From there, click on the gear menu and choose Add Vault.
This will create a new Vault for you, but before it asks where to put it, it’s going to tell you what is — and more importantly, what isn’t — going to be backed up.
As you can see above, for this small library, it’s telling me that there are 20 managed photos that will be backed up, but also 1,925 referenced photos that will not be backed up. This is quite important; do be sure to read the fine print so you know exactly what’s being backed up!
Once you hit Continue, you can choose a location for the Vault. In this demo I’ve left it on the Desktop, but clearly you want this to be on an external hard drive.
Now if you look at that Vault area in the bottom left corner of the Aperture window, you’ll see the Vault you just created. Toggle open the expand triangle, and it shows you the location of that Vault—handy if you decide to keep multiple Vaults (see next section).
Once you’ve created the Vault, you are NOT yet backed up! You still need to actually run the backup, and to do that, simply click on the little red arrowed-circle (the “Vault Status Button”) to kick off the first update. It’ll take a while to backup the first time, but subsequent backups will be much faster.
Once the backup is complete, the Vault Status Button will go black, showing that everything is backed up.
As soon as you change anything on an image (update the metadata, rating, etc. or make and adjustment), the Vault Status Button will change to yellow, showing that you should run the backup again.
And if you’re working managed and add any files to the library, it will change to red, indicating that it’s really important to back up again soon!
And again, to backup the Vault, simply click the Vault Status Button again and it’ll kick off a backup.
Multiple Vault Strategies
Does it make sense to have multiple Vaults? Sure thing! You can have more than one vault in multiple locations. We have a saying in this industry that if it doesn’t exist in three places, it doesn’t exist. You should have your original copy (of anything), a local backup, and a remote backup. So why not do the same with your Vaults?
Get two high-capacity USB hard drives (these don’t have to be fast Firewire drives, you’re not running anything off of these). A quick look on Amazon shows several sub-$100 1 TB USB hard drives
- Add a Vault to each drive, and run them both so both are current.
- Move Drive_1 to an external location, such as a friend’s house, a safety deposit box, or some other remote location. The farther the better. Consider that if your house burns down, your neighbor’s house might go with it, so storing your remote backup there isn’t the best idea. If you live in California and the big one hits, anywhere in this state may not be considered safe. Depending on your level of concern, you may want that offsite location to be really far offsite.
- At some point in the near future (week, month, etc., depending on how much you use Aperture), run the Vault again on Drive_2, bringing it up-to-date.
- Take Drive_2 to the location where Drive_1 is located, and swap them out. Bring Drive_1 back to your home/studio. Never have both backups (Drive_1 and Drive_2) in your home/studio (where the original is located) at the same time. Or that’ll be when disaster strikes. That’s how Murphy works.
- Repeat from step 3.
Cloud backup is a whole other discussion, and can apply to Vaults if you add that drive to your cloud system. That’s a great backup, but of course keeping copies that you can easily access is never a bad idea!
Joseph Linaschke | 16 Comments
Reader Comments (16)
After upgrading to Aperture 3, I noticed when I attempted to backup to the Vault, it showed that I have over 1200 Referenced Files. Prior to upgrading to Aperture 3, I had all Managed Files. I initially had Referenced Files that were being stored in iPhoto when I first transitioned to Aperture a few years ago. When I attempt to connect them, they are grayed out. Any ideas of how they can be re-connected and become Managed Files again. I want my Vault backup to cover all my photos.
Thanks -
Dudley Warner
Dudley,
Sounds to me like nothing has changed except that Aperture is now reporting correctly where the files are stored. If you make the iPhoto photos managed, then you'll be effectively doubling the required disk space, since the whole point of leaving them in iPhoto in the first place was so you could access the same photos in either Aperture or iPhoto.
If you really do want to move them to Aperture and ditch the iPhoto library, you certainly can. If you want both iPhoto and Aperture but want them Managed in Aperture, then you'll be doubling the space. All your choice, of course.
I am a little confused though in that you say "when I attempt to connect them…". Are you seeing the disconnected icon for referenced (the box with the arrow, but with a red line through it)? If so, you can reconnect the files using the Locate Referenced Files… tool under the File menu. Once connected, you can make them managed using the Consolidate Masters command.
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
Prior to upgrading to Aperture 3, I made all my photos Managed Files. After the upgrade, I have found that some of the photos are now Referenced Files. Each of them has the disconnected icon. When I look at the dialogue box that you get thru Locate Referenced Files, it shows that Macintosh HD is offline. There seems to be no way to get back online, and therefore no way to reconnect the files. Any ideas to fix this would be welcome.
Dudley,
You said there appears to be no way to get back online; have you clicked the "Show Reconnect Options" button? This will let you pick the hard drive that the images are actually on, and drill down to the image you need to connect to. Pick any image in the top that's listed as offline, find the same image on the drive in the bottom, and click Reconnect when the button lights up.
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
So I have multiple libraries for different purposes; work, personal, etc. I am having difficulties determining if after I setup a new library the vault updates each library together in the same recovery file. Meaning I open a library and update it; open another library and update it that they are not overwriting each other on my external hard disk for the vault file. My concern comes from the fact that the vault files (two hard drives) are both smaller than my largest library file. Do both libraries get saved in the same vault file?
Bryan,
Vaults are independent of each-other. Every Library would have a unique Vault, and in fact a single Library can have multiple Vaults. An easy way to check is to compare the "last modified" date on the Vaults right after you update one.
Does that make sense?
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
Question for you: I have a vault setup under AP3 with a managed lib size of some 40K+ pics on a USB drive. Each time I launch a vault backup it takes over 24h to complete - no kidding. Isn't AP supposed to only backup what is changed? Why is it taking so long?
Maxime,
Ouch. I'd start with a fresh vault; just make a new one (which will of course take a while), then increment from there. I think something is wrong with your existing vault.
Once you are confident that your new Vault is working properly, kill the old one.
USB is of course slow, so you're hitting that wall with transfer speeds. But you're right, it's an incremental backup, so unless you're adding thousands and thousands of photos every time, it should not be taking so long to back up.
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
My question is: When I import new images into AP3 I understand they are added to my managed primary Aperture library residing on my MacBook hard drive, but when I update the vault on my external hard drive does it create a whole new library in the vault or does it just back up the new additions to the managed Aperture library? Somehow when I updated before I seem to have created a duplicate library which is going to get rather confusing if that happens every time I update.
David,
The backup only adds what's added, it doesn't build a new library. The Vault is just a single file (package) on your drive. You definitely shouldn't be seeing duplicate libraries. If you are seeing something that weird, then I'd start clean. Build a whole new Vault, and once that's created and done loading, delete the old Vault(s).
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
I updated the vault to my external hard drive, successfully I think, but now I can't find the My Pictures folder anywhere. Spotlight can't find it, any ideas where it could have gone?
David,
I'm not sure what folder you're referring to. In the Home folder, there's a Pictures folder, but not one called My Pictures — is that what you're referring to, or are you talking about a folder you created?
If you still can't find it, please start a support thread over at www.ApertureExpert.com/forum — it'll be easier for others to follow there. Thanks.
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
Hi, I'm getting better at backing up using vaults on an almost monthly basis. I'm keeping each month as it's own vault. Now I've got a largish vault list, should I be deleting the older months? In your opinion is this the best way to go or is their a more efficient/drive space saving way?
Paul
Paul,
Good for you for backing up… however you're over-doing it :)
A Vault is not a one-time deal. Whenever you click the update wheel, the Vault will update what's changed, including removing files from the Vault that you've deleted (it actually moves them to a folder next to the Vault in the Finder named something like "removed photos"). There's no need to start a new Vault every month.
However, it certainly is a good idea to have more than one Vault, especially if this is your only backup (and if it is, then I advise you run it more often, and also invest in a cloud backup likeBackblaze so you have an offsite backup). Regardless though having more than one Vault on separate drives is a good idea. A vault can be a great recovery tool if you lose your library due to drive failure, theft, or even just because you want to go back a version ("oh crap, I deleted those photos since my last Vault backup", and you can restore from the Vault — but you will also lose any other work done since then).
If you really want to do it right, have two (or more, but two is good) Vaults on separate hard drive that are on rotation between wherever your computer lives, and somewhere else. i.e., take that second drive to your office, home, friend's house, safety deposit box, whatever — but get it out of your primary location. Remember, if your house burns down, everything in the house goes with it. All the backups in the world won't help you if they're all sitting on your desk in a fire. Or theft; thieves aren't going to leave behind one of your backups for you just to be nice :)
I hope that helps, and feel free to ask any more questions!
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
Thanks Joseph
Basically I'm a "hoarder" scared to delete and lose exposures just in case I ever think that I could do something with them.
Have I got this right, if I delete something and then back up in a vault, I'll still be able to find the deleted images in this "deleted images" folder?
Paul,
Other way around. If you back up to the Vault, then delete managed files (not referenced!), then the next time you run the Vault, those files will be moved to a "deleted" folder.
Try it out to test it to see for yourself. Create a new Library, add two managed photos, back up to a Vault, delete one photo (be sure to empty the trash), update the Vault, and check it.
-Joseph @ApertureExpert