A short thread on Apples' Aperture discussion board gives a possible solution to the problem of vaults that will not update due to errors on specific images:

Aperture is not letting me update my vaults. I am receiving update vault error messages when trying to back up to Vaults. I have three backup Vaults on external firewire drives, formatted Mac HFS+ (not MS-DOS) and not partitioned. My Aperture library is also on a dedicated external drive. I get the same message for all three vaults, so this seems to be an Aperture problem, not a disk problem. The error messages refer to NEF (raw) image files that do not exist in my Library (or anywhere else, for that matter). Message reads:

update vault error:
The following error occured:
Couldn't create/Volumes/LaCie/ApertureV2.apvault/Library/....

Any insights would be appreciated.

Another reader with a similar problem found a solution:

I managed to fix my problem by making an adjustment to the photo that the error message referenced.

This and the fact that all three of the poster's vaults fail to update implies that the problem is not with the vault, but with the library: there is something about the information that Aperture stores about that image that causes an error. When the image is adjusted the bad file is overwritten and the problem goes away. Vaults don't contain thumbnails or previews, so it can't be those. The master in this case is referenced, and in any case is never updated. So it must be with the sidecar files.

The original poster can't apply this fix because the image that is causing the problem apparently does not exist, so I'm investigating this with him. Update: We traced the problem to "something bad" about the folder or its contents that was being reported. By opening the library and the vault with control-click Show Package Contents and navigating down, it was possible to trash the folder. Not only did the vault update complete once that was done, but it worked many, many times faster than before. The bad news is that I think this is due to a bad spot on the disk, indicating a drive that is on its way out. If you have vault problems: back up carefully and consider that you may have a bad disk.

Vault problems can be caused by using the wrong disk format, typically FAT32, because the drive arrived that way and was never reformatted. FAT32 cannot support the characters used by Aperture in folder names and so causes errors. Another cause of problems is that the ownership of files and folders in the vault may be at odds with the current user. This can be fixed by checking the box for Ignore ownership on this volume on the information window for the volume (command I):

This is really neat. John Hoogstrate has created a PHP-based system for browsing, filtering, and viewing Aperture libraries with a web browser called PHPture. It's open source and available at Source Forge . It uses SQLite to access the Aperture database and makes use of the high-resolution previews feature of Aperture 1.5 to display the images. It only ever reads the database so should be completely safe. Installation is not trivial since it needs PHP 5.

The design is very Aperture-like as you can see from the screen shot. An obvious application for this is when you have a number of people who need to be able to browse a library. Share it on the network or your machine and point PHPture at it. Multiple copies off Aperture are not needed.

It *does* need a new name though.

Here is how to find your Aperture library if you don't know where it is.

Launch Aperture and open the application preferences under the Aperture menu (or hit command comma). At the top of the window the current library location can be seen and changed:

The ~ character (tilde) means my home folder.

There is also a quick way to find all of your Aperture libraries on any or all of your disks. Open a Finder window -- any one will do. Then press command F. That turns the Finder window into a Find window (confusing but true):

Now select Computer or Home, or appropriate disks (via Others) using the buttons just below the toolbar. That will limit the search to whatever is chosen. Then delete the Last Opened entry by clicking the - button on the right end of the line. All you need for this is one line that starts with Kind, so if there are others, get rid of them too, and change the remaining one to Kind.

On the pop-up to the right of Kind, select Others... and type Library into the box. Instantly you will get a list of all the libraries:

This will find all sorts of libraries, not just Aperture libraries, but you can easily scroll through to find what you are looking for.

The TextWrangler and Preview icons are on my toolbar because I dragged the application icons there. It's a little-known feature that you can put almost anything in the toolbar and it will appear on all the Finder windows for easy access -- either for clicking or for dropping things onto. The only thing I don't recommend adding is servers and other volumes that may go off line. That can hang the Finder.

It is possible to create new Aperture projects quickly and without taking your hands off the keyboard:

• Select an existing project that is inside the library or blue folder where you want the new projects to be
• Press command N
• Type the name of the new project
• Don't hit return or click anywhere: just hit command N again and repeat for the next project

Several times I have imported images into the library when I intended to leave them where they were and reference them. The import pane has a Store Files popup:

but it is easy to forget to set this before every import and there is no option to make a default. I suspect that at least in Aperture 1.5.1 this control is unpredictable.

If I imported the images and still have the originals where they were, then this is easy to fix. I just click on the project I imported into and filter by import session:

By filtering down to just the erroneously imported images I can select and delete them. Since my originals are still on the hard drive I just redo the import, this time making the correct selections.

If I imported the images but have already deleted them, then the only copies live in the library and I have to get them out. By finding the images with a filter as above I can relocate the masters out of the library and back to where I want them. Selecting the images and using File > Relocate Masters allows me to select the relocation location by folder format and file name:

The only hitch is that if I imported a hierarchy using Files > Import > Folders Into A Project, I may not be able to use the file folder presets on the relocate dialog to create the same folder hierarchy that they originally came from. The good news is that the Aperture library tracks these file movements and so once the relocation is complete there is nothing else to do: no need to reimport anything.

A way to avoid this problem entirely with referenced masters is to always import into the Aperture library and then always relocate later. I recommend that workflow because it means that all of the referenced masters are in locations created by Aperture and so can be put back there should the need arise.

You can easily find out which vaults Aperture has archived individual images into. Select an image and then show the inspector (I). Then look at the metadata section at the bottom. Click on the Archive button bottom right:

That shows the name of the vault (Local250 in my case) and the date and time that this image was updated in the vault. Really the button should say Vault instead of Archive. If you enable the Include In Summary checkbox then the vault information is added to the metadata set selected above, in this case the General set. That lets you display the vault information on screen with the image.

I found this article that delves into the SQLite database that lies inside the Aperture library. There are other Aperture articles on this site on performance, and downsampling.