Step Inside The Aperture Vault
2006-07-18
As part of my back up strategy, I use an Aperture Vault. The vault lives on a Firewire drive that I keep connected to the computer but normally turned off. That's what that particular drive is for: quick back ups of critical items that cannot wait for my regular 5am back up to another drive (that back up is driven by SuperDuper).
I'll create a vault and look inside. Clicking on the middle icon in the lower left-hand corner of the Aperture window brings up the vault pane:
No vaults yet. I'll add a new Vault to my Firewire drive "Crow" and call it Blog:
Local250 is another Aperture vault that is already on the drive. The new vault, Blog, appears in the Vault pane. Clicking the disclosure triangle shows which drive it is on:
You can have as many vaults as you like on a drive.
It is possible to create a Vault on a network volume, although Aperture tries to prevent this. To create a vault on a network volume, first create one on a Firewire drive, then Quit Aperture and copy the vault to the network volume and delete the original on the Firewire drive. Start Aperture again the vault will show as Offline. You can tell Aperture the new location of the vault by control-clicking on it and selecting New locaton.
Updating the vault takes a long time the first time, but subsequent updates are very fast because only the differences are resolved. Vaults are not archives -- that is they do not store any history, such as items you may have deleted a long time ago. They are just a snapshot of the library at one moment in time, so if you delete something in the library and update the vault, that thing is gone. (Well, almost gone. You actually get one last chance! More on that in a later article).
If the drive is disconnected, Aperture knows this and will show the status:
If you try to update you will get a dialog box:
My Aperture library for the examples in this blog is 91.8 Mbytes in size. Yet when I look at the vault I see it is only 75 Mbytes. That's 18% less. For my real Aperture library, the vault is 26% smaller. What is missing?
The vault is a package, just like the Aperture library. Packages are just folders marked to look like a single icon. Packages are opened by control-clicking and selecting Show Package Contents. Here is the inside of the vault I created:
So the vault contains all the keywords and other settings. But there is no database. So restoring from a vault requires that Aperture rebuild the database. Looking inside the Library folder gets this:
This looks just like the Aperture library itself. Let's look inside the Photos project:
That's almost like the Aperture library, but some things are missing. The Aperture Library has this in it:
Notice that the AP.Minis and other similar files are missing. Those are the cached thumbnails. So restoring from a vault also requires Aperture to rebuild the thumbnails.
If I look inside the import group folder I see my images:
So there they are, complete with all the adjustment and version information. Everything I need is in the vault.
One last thing that confuses people. The vault icon has a little lock next to it:
That shows that the file is locked. If you do a get Info, you will see that the Locked box is checked:
If you try to trash the locked vault, the Finder will prevent it. You must remove the lock first, then drag to trash.
I'll create a vault and look inside. Clicking on the middle icon in the lower left-hand corner of the Aperture window brings up the vault pane:
No vaults yet. I'll add a new Vault to my Firewire drive "Crow" and call it Blog:
Local250 is another Aperture vault that is already on the drive. The new vault, Blog, appears in the Vault pane. Clicking the disclosure triangle shows which drive it is on:
You can have as many vaults as you like on a drive.
It is possible to create a Vault on a network volume, although Aperture tries to prevent this. To create a vault on a network volume, first create one on a Firewire drive, then Quit Aperture and copy the vault to the network volume and delete the original on the Firewire drive. Start Aperture again the vault will show as Offline. You can tell Aperture the new location of the vault by control-clicking on it and selecting New locaton.
Updating the vault takes a long time the first time, but subsequent updates are very fast because only the differences are resolved. Vaults are not archives -- that is they do not store any history, such as items you may have deleted a long time ago. They are just a snapshot of the library at one moment in time, so if you delete something in the library and update the vault, that thing is gone. (Well, almost gone. You actually get one last chance! More on that in a later article).
If the drive is disconnected, Aperture knows this and will show the status:
If you try to update you will get a dialog box:
My Aperture library for the examples in this blog is 91.8 Mbytes in size. Yet when I look at the vault I see it is only 75 Mbytes. That's 18% less. For my real Aperture library, the vault is 26% smaller. What is missing?
The vault is a package, just like the Aperture library. Packages are just folders marked to look like a single icon. Packages are opened by control-clicking and selecting Show Package Contents. Here is the inside of the vault I created:
So the vault contains all the keywords and other settings. But there is no database. So restoring from a vault requires that Aperture rebuild the database. Looking inside the Library folder gets this:
This looks just like the Aperture library itself. Let's look inside the Photos project:
That's almost like the Aperture library, but some things are missing. The Aperture Library has this in it:
Notice that the AP.Minis and other similar files are missing. Those are the cached thumbnails. So restoring from a vault also requires Aperture to rebuild the thumbnails.
If I look inside the import group folder I see my images:
So there they are, complete with all the adjustment and version information. Everything I need is in the vault.
One last thing that confuses people. The vault icon has a little lock next to it:
That shows that the file is locked. If you do a get Info, you will see that the Locked box is checked:
If you try to trash the locked vault, the Finder will prevent it. You must remove the lock first, then drag to trash.
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