i have several large libraries (3 to 4 tb) left over on older drives from when i bought a new drive and copied the active library over to it. is there a way to convert the old library to a vault, so that i don't have to spend 2 days waiting for it to create a whole new vault from scratch?
I was about to reply “No, you can’t do that”, but then I decided it was worthy of some investigation.
First, I did a cursory look into the file structures of an Aperture library and it’s corresponding vault. They are nearly identical, but not all files are present in both.
Second, I copied a small Aperture library to another location to simulate your old library copy. Then from within Aperture, I created a new vault in the same location, but with a different name. Note that I created it, but I did not update it.
Next, I closed Aperture, then unlocked and deleted the empty new vault that Aperture had created, and then renamed the old library to the same name that the vault had.
I opened Aperture and told it to update the vault. Surprisingly, it did not complain, but updated the “vault” - rather quickly as all of the masters were already there.
I’ll end this by saying that this idea has some merit, but would need MUCH more testing before I would actually rely on it. Would you want to risk not being able to recover after a disk failure because you took a shortcut?
Interesting test, for sure. Thanks Tim.
However I’d retort that even if this works, what’s the point? It will take time to recover from a vault, when you already have a working library. Since this conversion won’t save any space, then what’s the point of turning a working library into a vault that has to be restored? Just leave the library intact, or zip it if you want to save a little space.
-Joseph
@PhotoJoseph
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the point of turning a working library into a vault would be to save 2 days of down time per conversion (i have two old libraries on two different disks). i also expect that this is not the last time i may want to migrate to a newer, bigger hd. if i can simply change the name and then update the new ‘vault’ with only new additions to the library, this would be a huge benefit. i suspected it could be possible because i had read about doing the reverse (turning a vault into a library, when restoring it didn’t work).
i have no idea how to test this conversion adequately, however. i guess i was hoping a rogue apple engineer could chime in and say, oh sure, that wouldn’t pose any problems. or, is the process of updating a vault sufficiently error-checking that the update itself would ensure that it worked?
unfortunately it sounds so far like the best guess is that it *might* work, but that to be safe (which i try to be with backups), i need to just delete those libraries and start a vault from scratch.
Chris,
My point is, why have a vault when you already have a library? You’re not going to be updating the Vault; this is simply for archive purposes. You’re not going to save any space by doing this simple conversion. So what is the benefit of putting a vault on your archive drives instead of just putting the existing libraries on those drives?
The benefit of creating and updating a vault on a regular basis is that subsequent backups only require the delta of what’s changed, so the update is faster than it would be to copy the entire library to another drive as a backup. However if you’re talking about making a vault ONCE, then I don’t see the point.
And, no Apple engineer will ever post on here if he values his job. Things are very controlled at Apple, and they aren’t generally allowed to post. They do read these, however.
@PhotoJoseph
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Joseph - he already has the old library on the external drive. He was hoping to shorten the time needed to create the vault by using the old copy of the library, which already has all of his masters in it. I can see why he’d want to do this, as the initial creation of the vault can be a time consuming process.
However, I think he should just delete his old library copy & start a new vault from scratch. I was just intrigued at the idea he raised here - how close are the vault and library formats.
Tim
Tim,
Right, I get that — but my question is, “why make the vault at all”? What is the benefit of a vault vs the library itself for archival purposes?
-Joseph
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i wanted a vault because i *do* want to continue to update it into the near future. i had to move the main library to a larger drive, but there is still /some/ space on the old drive (one is a 6tb raid)–for the purposes of a vault, i don’t care as much about keeping enough empty space to ensure speedy performance, and i can delete some of the other vaults on that drive as well, dedicating the penultimate drive exclusively to be a backup of my new primary drive, instead of functioning as a primary for multiple libraries, as before.
i get the point of also keeping some snapshot copies of the library on other drives in addition to backing up with vaults, but as it happens i was going to do that on other drives (i have a 3tb that this snapshot should just barely fit on, leaving me another tb of vault updates on one of the former primary drives, for instance.)
i understand that apple employees can’t speak on behalf of apple outside the company. i was just musing or wishing that there was a way to confirm whether the lib-to-vault conversion would in principle work, or not, since i couldn’t imagine a good way to comprehensively test it.
i guess i will just have to knock my computer out of commission for another two days will i delete and then re-create the vault. for that time i won’t actually have a backup, though, which is kind of scary for that amount of data. not enough drives, obviously.
thanks tim and joseph for the replies. much appreciated.
Chris,
aha, OK. I missed that you wanted to add to the vault. I’d definitely not try any shortcuts then… if you are trying to make a vault that Aperture can continue to update, just do it properly.
Good luck,
-Joseph
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yes, i will slog through the whole delete and re-create process to be on the safe side. thanks again.
if any apple engineers do happen to read this, though, i would want them to consider the fact that what i am doing can’t be all that uncommon; we often need to move libraries from one drive to another for any number of reasons, after which the old library on the old drive would be a natural base on which to build a new vault… if they provided a sanctioned way to switch or convert back and forth between active library and vault, it would save a huge amount of my time.
just whistlin’ past the graveyard…
Chris,
So let me ask this… if you moved the library from drive A to drive B, what happened to the vault that you had made while the library lived on drive A? Or did you never have one.
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oh, i have vaults. i keep at least two vaults of each library, unless that library is consolidated into another backed-up one.
the problem is that since my libraries aren’t getting any smaller, i keep having to buy larger hard drives, and then the previously hot-stuff drives get demoted to vault duty. but eventually, as you go down the chain, the older drives are no longer big enough to hold a a single vault of the current libraries.
it would help if the vaults could span multiple drives, but i understand why they want to avoid that.
in some paradisiacal future, i may have all the storage i can use x3 on three separate raid arrays, which would allow me to consolidate both my active libraries and my vaults onto just three devices (kept separately, of course). but the nature of my finances dictate that that will never happen, even though i am doing well enough. so i stumble on, buying at a rate just ahead of what i need: i can afford one big raid, but i can’t buy three new ones all at once. i just got a 12tb raid (9tb in raid 5), so that is currently ample, and demotes my 6 and 4 tb drives to backup duty, which cascades down the stream to my 3, and several 2tb drives. (the smaller ones get messy, since there are different unconsolidated libraries and vaults on different drives…) isn’t this what most people experience? assuming they even have a backup strategy.
apple in their infinite wisdom designs things like aperture libraries, iPhoto and iTunes libraries as though you would never run into storage space problems, and could keep it all available right at your fingertips inside your laptop. i would love to be able to have all my iTunes, iPhoto, and aperture libraries available at once, and securely backed up without a spaghetti of overlapping strategies. but between extensive raw photo libraries (and 250mb tiff scans) and hd video projects and collections, who can afford this? obviously someone will say that’s the point of the cloud, but for content you generate yourself, it is far too slow.
i am hoping that there will be a wave of more reasonable thunderbolt raid devices any day now–i’d like to be able to get a simple 12 or 16tb one from owc to complement my 12tb esata–but i’ve been hoping that for 6 months or more. obviously the flooding in thailand hasn’t helped (though maybe it is about to, as revamped capacity comes on line). seriously, that would make my life easier.