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Plist corruption #1
Wombat's picture
by Wombat
September 20, 2012 - 12:12am

Guys
Try to make this short.
For months now I have been struggling with LaCie senior tech support trying to find out why my external 12T RAID keeps going down.
Eventually, this led the techs and myself to corrupt data. This happened a few months ago and I wound up re-building my entire array. Luckily, I have a back-up - rebuilt - move on.
SO, months later, this time, no such luck. I did, however manage to rebuild the directory structure through DiskWarrior and the drive seesm to mount.
I also ran a scan on the file structure to see if I could pin-point where the corruption was coming from. Out of millions of files, the Aperture .plist files ( 67 of them ) were corrupt. More specifically, a number of random .plists in 'Database/History/Changes'
I ran the same scan on the backed up drive and they were confirmed.

I took a look a the 'corrupted files in BBEdit and they are all different sizes, some huge strings like

<dict>
<key>changeMask</key>
529288
<key>changeUuid</key>
<string>Y6jHxBhNQC20IufVHe5eDA</string>
<key>changeDate</key>
<real>342275701.303674</real>
<key>table</key>
<string>RKVersionChange</string>
</dict

My question is - what to do next ? How to avoid this from happening and what are the implications of deleting these particular files ?

What exactly does the .plist carry ( i know its prefs, but what exactly ? ) and can I just nuke these altogether with no effect to my workflow? Is there a tut or explanation of .plists in general somewhere ( because there are tons of them if you unpack. Makes me rather nervous, quite frankly )

The library, at fist glance does not seem to be affected, by the corrupted files except the Ap is running strange and will crash. I suspect they will get worse.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Wombat // Photography
www.wombatsnap.com

Diamo's picture
by Diamo
November 7, 2012 - 8:33pm

John
Have a similar problem my self.
Disk warrior showed several corrupt files in an aperture library.
They are in the database/history/changes/ folder of the .aplibrary package file.
In this folder there are 171 plists dating back to the time i created the Aperture library, one year ago. At a guess these are what the folder structure indicates. A history of changes made.

A solution to this is to select all the projects and all the albums and export them as a new library. ie export the whole library using File>export>items as New Library. I didn’t select any of the export options apart from Show alert when finished. (I use referenced masters.)

The new aperture aplibrary package file only has one plist in the database/history/changes/ folder.

If this is a solution, it may also be a way to solve several other odd things that happen time to time as I would hope that Aperture would build clean libraries with no hidden errors.
Original library with previews (2560*2560) 7300 versions. 16.06gig
New library no previews 4.35gig.
Time to build approx 30 mins.

Hope this helps

John

PhotoJoseph's picture
by PhotoJoseph
September 20, 2012 - 6:37pm

John,

You can safely trash plist files and just reset your preferences in Aperture, but there is only one actual Aperture plist. What are the other 66?

-Joseph @ApertureExpert Have you signed up for the ApertureExpert mailing list?

@PhotoJoseph
— Have you signed up for the mailing list?

gfsymon's picture
by gfsymon
September 21, 2012 - 3:07am

John,

it sounds like HD problems. Very difficult to test/verify without having another disk to use in its place.

Grant

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