Restoring A Library
Vaults store the critical data from an Aperture library so that you have a back up in case disaster strike your main drive. Lets restore a library from a vault to see what happens.
I quit Aperture, rename my library, and restart Aperture. I expected to be able to just select Restore Vault from the vault pane, but that was grayed out. So I had to go to the File -> Vault menu and select Restore Vault from there. Aperture had created a new empty Aperture Library file for me, so all I had to do was tell Aperture where to restore from and to:
Data loss paranoia rules here:
The files are read back in, and Aperture must be relaunched:
On relaunch Aperture sees that it lacks a database and so asks if I want to rebuild the database:
This step can take a significant time to complete. I have seen many complaints on discussion boards about the rebuild, since it was unexpected. There is a trade-off: if the vault contained everything then it could contain everything with corruption, but would be complete and take less time to restore as the cost of more disk space. Apple has taken the safe route and chosen to just keep the data it needs to keep.
The restored library is not as big as the original library: it's the same size as the vault actually. Only when I click on a project does it rebuild the thumbnails: again this can take a long time and there is no warning that this needs to be done. The thumbnails, once recreated are cached, and so subsequent opens of the project are fast.
A vault reflects the same contents as the library after updating, so you would think that if you delete an image and then back up to a vault, the image is gone, both from the library and the vault. But you would be wrong. Just as Aperture saves images deleted from the library by putting them into the trash, it also saves images deleted from the vault by putting them onto the drive that the vault is on. To show this, I deleted three images, backed up, and got this on my Firewire drive:
The masters are there, each in individual folders. The containing folders are named after the date and time. The files you see in the screen capture above are very small because the example TIFFs I was using really are very small.
I quit Aperture, rename my library, and restart Aperture. I expected to be able to just select Restore Vault from the vault pane, but that was grayed out. So I had to go to the File -> Vault menu and select Restore Vault from there. Aperture had created a new empty Aperture Library file for me, so all I had to do was tell Aperture where to restore from and to:
Data loss paranoia rules here:
The files are read back in, and Aperture must be relaunched:
On relaunch Aperture sees that it lacks a database and so asks if I want to rebuild the database:
This step can take a significant time to complete. I have seen many complaints on discussion boards about the rebuild, since it was unexpected. There is a trade-off: if the vault contained everything then it could contain everything with corruption, but would be complete and take less time to restore as the cost of more disk space. Apple has taken the safe route and chosen to just keep the data it needs to keep.
The restored library is not as big as the original library: it's the same size as the vault actually. Only when I click on a project does it rebuild the thumbnails: again this can take a long time and there is no warning that this needs to be done. The thumbnails, once recreated are cached, and so subsequent opens of the project are fast.
A vault reflects the same contents as the library after updating, so you would think that if you delete an image and then back up to a vault, the image is gone, both from the library and the vault. But you would be wrong. Just as Aperture saves images deleted from the library by putting them into the trash, it also saves images deleted from the vault by putting them onto the drive that the vault is on. To show this, I deleted three images, backed up, and got this on my Firewire drive:
The masters are there, each in individual folders. The containing folders are named after the date and time. The files you see in the screen capture above are very small because the example TIFFs I was using really are very small.
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