I have a MacBookPro with a custom set up. 240 GB internal SSD and an additional internal HD of 1 TB.
Here is my setup running latest Aperture:
Library on SSD
Photos managed on SSD
Video referenced by Aperture on 1 TB drive
All worked great, but I was getting tight on space on SSD, so I Relocated Originals of all my photos to the 1 TB drive. AND THEN IT DIED ON ME! :-(
I have a very recent backup from last week of both the SSD and the 1 TB drive. Bootable backups from SuperDuper.
However, I'm confused as to how to go about cobbling back together a working library now. My confusion stems from the fact that I now have:
Aperture library on SSD looking for referenced photos and videos on a 1 TB drive that is dead.
My SSD backup has Aperture library with photos managed and videos referenced.
My 1 TB backup from last week just has the referenced videos; not the relocated originals that my current Aperture library is looking for…
To top it all off my SSD doesn't have space to just copy back the managed Aperture library file from last week's SSD back up!
Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks!
John,
You need to recover the managed Aperture library from your SSD backup, and eventually discard the referenced-but-missing-originals library that’s currently on your SSD. But do NOT, by any means, delete that first!!
So this means you need another drive, at 3x the size of your library that you’re recovering from, seems to be the norm. It was only a 240GB drive so the library can’t be terribly big; any external 1TB will do it.
1. Recover the library from your backup to some other drive.
2. Verify that it’s valid!!!
3. Presumably you will replace your internal 1TB drive, and rebuild that from SuperDuper, so that’ll be where you left off.
4. Relocate Originals from the recovered Aperture library, still on another drive, to the new internal 1TB drive. Do this first, because in case there’s something else foul here, you don’t want a repeat of the previous crash experience.
5. Once this is successful (i.e. you have a full referenced library on your external drive, with all Originals on the 1TB internal), you have two options.
6a. You can try to reconnect the library currently on the SSD to the Originals you moved to the 1TB drive. If you do this, I’d do a repair on the library first. It may have gotten damaged mid-relocate before when you had the crash. You didn’t say if the crash happened after the relocate, or during it, but that library may be fine, or it may be damaged goods.
6b. Just erase the SSD library and copy the one that you just recovered and made referenced to the SSD.
good luck, and good for you for having a backup!
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
• Have you signed up for the ApertureExpert mailing list?
•• Have you picked up your copy of the Nik Collection for just $126? This deal won’t last forever!
@PhotoJoseph
— Have you signed up for the mailing list?
Thanks Joseph. Makes sense. Only complication is that I am away from home and tech support for a month or more, so I won’t be replacing the internal 1 TB drive anytime soon.
So, I think that leaves me with buying an external drive to serve as my internal 1 TB drive did before in the interim?
1 TB drive did not die on me during relocate originals. It was a few hours afterward.
While conceptually, I think I get what you are saying to do…other complication is that my backup of Library is dated about a week. I’d rather not lose that work.
Any way around losing that week of work?
Yep, sounds like an external drive is your only hope for now.
Since the 1TB died later, then it sounds like your existing library is intact. So that’s good; I’d recover, export, and reconnect then. Make sure you use the same folder structure as you did before or you’ll be chasing images in the reconnect dialog for a week.
If your backup is a week old and the only copy of the images between the backup and the crash were on the 1TB drive, then I’m not sure what you’re asking me… you can try recovery software to get those images back, but if the drive is toast and there’s no other copies of the original, they they’re gone. If you had preview generation turned on, then perhaps you have JPEGs of half or whatever size in the current library, so that’s better than nothing.
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
• Have you signed up for the ApertureExpert mailing list?
•• Have you picked up your copy of the Nik Collection for just $126? This deal won’t last forever!
@PhotoJoseph
— Have you signed up for the mailing list?
Thanks. Does fact that all changes I’d want to capture were published to shared photo stream help in some way?
Sure, at least you can copy those photos back to your library. They may not be full size and they will be JPEGs not raw but it’s something!
-Joseph
@PhotoJoseph
— Have you signed up for the mailing list?