Disaster Recovery is the subject of the latest post at O’Reilly Media’s Inside Aperture website. In the article, Ian Wood discusses various methods of recovering or finding what appear to be lost images within the Aperture package.
While it is possible to see the “contents” of your Aperture library with a right-click and “Show Package Contents”, I’ve opted for one more safeguard against losing images. Aperture, for the most part, has worked well as a means to organize, back-up, and lightly edit my images, BUT there can be problems that make me uneasy about relying solely on the application. When Aperture 2 was upgraded to 2.1, I experienced quite a number of problems, including issues with cropping. In addition to not cropping correctly (still a problem), several images “disappeared” from my library. As discussed at Inside Aperture, there are several means of trying to find the master images, but they involve working within Aperture.
My Aperture library is a managed library, meaning that I keep my master files in it. But, I also keep copies of the masters outside of Aperture as an additional precaution and easy way to retrieve any missing images. This serves the additional purpose of making the images readily available to my family members who don’t have Aperture installed on their Macs or PCs.
Here is the workflow I use:
1. Import images into Aperture making the master image name one that incorporates the photographer’s initials and the date/time image was taken. Images are imported into a project called “Send Masters to Backup”.
2. Update vaults.
3. Add keywords, captions, etc. to the new images.
4. Export masters, including IPTC. This exports a copy of the master and retains the other copy in the Aperture library. (Because this level of redundancy takes up a lot of disk space, images are stored on 500 GB and 1 TB external drives.)
I use a subfolder format of ImageYear/Month/Day to store the master image copies and keep the name the same as the name of the copy inside Aperture. These subfolders are stored in a folder called “Master Image Files.” You can see the structure below:
5. After exporting the copies of the master images, I move the images into the desired projects within the Aperture library.
Yes, this is redundant and could be considered excessive in terms of backup, but it does serve an additional purpose in providing a way for non-Aperture users to be able to access the images.
