Inside Aperture

Backup Strategies with Aperture, Part Two
Pages: 1, 2

With photo-specific online services, including SmugMug, SpitFire, and PhotoShelter, you won't be able to backup specific image adjustments and album hierarchies. However, these sites provide photo business features that might make you want to upload a copy of your images to their servers. In fact, each of the above sites provides an Aperture plug-in that lets you quickly upload images to their sites.

The PhotoShelter Aperture plug-in provides an easy way to upload your images to PhotoShelter.

In PhotoShelter, for example, when you upload your master images into your archive, PhotoShelter automatically generates previews for each supported file so that you can place the images into a gallery and let people see your work. If you choose, PhotoShelter will also apply a watermark (default style or custom) to each image, and with a few simple steps, you can set up your images to be available for sale with customizable FotoQuote-based pricing. Even better is that PhotoShelter will pick up the keywords and metadata that you set on each image in Aperture, display it, and let people search for it. Here is a sample gallery. If that's still not enough, PhotoShelter provides a way to customize your galleries so that you can seamlessly integrate your PhotoShelter archive with your web site. The prices of these services all vary, but most have limited free trial accounts (such as a 25MB PhotoShelter trial) to let customers get a feel for what the service provides.

Be warned that uploading and downloading to these sites can be slow, depending on your Internet connection. If possible, start your uploads right before going to bed!

Until you do choose to subscribe to a service, be it general or photo-specific, make sure to periodically check and see what new features each service provides--they're all constantly improving!

Time Machine

Speaking of constant improvement, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard provides a great improvement in backup technology called Time Machine. The idea behind Time Machine is that people don't backup their data reliably enough. With Time Machine, you start by connecting an external drive. Then, a few seconds later, when prompted by Mac OS X, you say that you want to store your Time Machine backups on the drive. That's it. Under System Preferences, you can select what disk you store the backup on and set certain files to be excluded from backups.

What's really great about Time Machine is that it's completely automatic—once you turn it on updates just happen behind the scenes. When it comes time to restore a file, Apple's ease-of-use wizardry comes into play. Simply press the Time Machine button to enter a special mode where you can browse a folder or search results through time. When you find the point in time where the desired file exists, you can even confirm that it's the file you want by using Quick Look, press restore, and the file is automatically restored.

There is even already a third-party selling a product called BackJack Continuum that lets you archive your Time Machine data offsite, protecting it more effectively. Between a local backup and this offsite backup, your data will be very well protected!

Unfortunately, at the time of writing, Time Machine and Aperture don't play as nicely together as they could. The issue is that Aperture has a database file within the library, and, if Time Machine's backup is during a running Aperture session and later restores that file, some of the restored data might not be correct. The best option is to exclude the Aperture library from Time Machine (navigate to System Preferences > Time Machine > Options, click the + button in the Do Not Backup window, and select your library). Thankfully, there are plenty of other backup options out there for your images, and hopefully future versions of Aperture will work properly with Time Machine.

Sample Workflow

With all of these different options to choose from, it can be overwhelming to figure out how to setup a workflow that's right for you. Here's a sample workflow, focusing on backup, that I find to be easy and quite reliable!

1. If I'm out in the field shooting, each day or so, I will export my project to my iPod, giving me a backup in case something happens to my laptop. In an ideal world, I'd also have a device like the Jobo GigaVu Pro where I could download each CF card as soon as it was full, giving me an instant backup.
2. When I get back to my home office, I immediately export the new project to my external RAID 5 array. On here, I keep an Aperture library that has my entire image library. (It's a large RAID drive!) I'll continue to set keywords and work on the project from my laptop, and once done, I'll re-export it to my RAID array.
3. Offsite, I keep another external hard drive (it's currently a single G-Technologies drive, but I'm considering switching my main RAID array to a Drobo and making my RAID 5 unit my offsite drive). I'll bring my laptop to that site, connect it to the backup drive, and copy over the new project. I don't use a vault on this hard drive because I want it to contain all my images--since my laptop only has a subset of my library, I'd need to have the backup drive and my RAID array with my full library connected to the same computer to use a vault. I don't want to have the two drives in the same location. Furthermore, I like having the flexibility of attaching this backup drive to another computer and loading the Aperture library. In fact, I had an urgent request for an image recently when I was at my offsite location, and because I set this drive up with my full Aperture library, I was able to find and submit my image quickly.
4. In an ideal world, which means when I have time, I'll also use .mac Backup (I'm a .mac subscriber and get it for free) to create a set of archival-grade DVDs for this project. These DVDs include the project data so that I can quickly restore the project in Aperture.
5. When I rate my images, three stars and above mean that I care about the image and want to make sure it's backed up (conveniently, these three star and above images are also the images that I register with the US Copyright Office). In PhotoShelter, via the Aperture plugin, I make a new folder for the project and create a "RAW" folder within it. I then export my master files to the RAW folder.
6. My four and five star images are typically ones that I consider good enough to try selling. I upload high-quality JPEG files at the original size to a JPEG folder and build my public PhotoShelter gallery using the images in this JPEG folder. I store a version of these images in addition to the master so that I have a file with all of the adjustments that I made in Aperture applied to it. I've found that high-res JPEGs are fine for most uses, and they take far less disk space than uploading high-res TIFF files (especially given that I do upload my master images).

Final Thoughts

Although this workflow isn't as automatic as I might like, I do create redundancy at the appropriate times (while shooting, when partially edited, and when editing is done). Furthermore, I try to make it as convenient as possible so that I'm more likely to want to backup for other reasons, like having my images available offsite or on PhotoShelter.

Hopefully you have an idea now about which backup strategies and workflow will be right for you!

Check out Part One in the series, Backup Strategies with Aperture.

Josh Anon is a technical director at Pixar Animation Studios (with credits ranging from software engineering to cinematography) and an instructor at BetterPhoto.com. Recently, he co-authored Aperture Exposed (Wiley, 2006). You can find out more about Josh and his photography at www.joshanon.com.

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Showing messages 1 through 7 of 7.

• Aperture/Time Machine FIXED!
  2008-02-12 13:34:06  srparker [Reply | View]
  
  
  Just FYI, Apple is reporting the Time Machine/Aperture issue is fixed in 10.5.2
  
  See http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306853 for more info
  
  Steve
• Aperture/Time Machine FIXED!
  2008-02-12 16:21:57  Josh Anon | [Reply | View]
  
  
  You are correct--thanks for the update!

• bandwidth and online backup
  2007-11-14 04:21:29  fmedery [Reply | View]
  
  
  Tx for the great articles. For several months now I am using my dreamhost account to copy my data (using a rsync script). So far so good.
  But the biggest problem with online backup is the bandwidth used to copy the data.
  Here in Quebec, Canada, there is no unlimited bandwidth.
  The size of the 1st sync was 35 GB. It took me several month to create my first backup ! Now it is hundred MB per week but it is still a lot when you have an upload/download quota.
  
  Still a great article!

• Mozy is not $4.95 for pro's
  2007-11-10 15:12:05  tegbains [Reply | View]
  
  

  They charge $3.95 per Mac/PC and then $0.50 GB per month...

  
  
  

  It's $4.95 for unlimited data for personal, non-commercial use.

  
  
• Mozy is not $4.95 for pro's
  2007-11-11 00:49:20  Josh Anon | [Reply | View]
  
  
  You are correct--thanks!

• Smart Handling of Packages
  2007-11-10 13:55:37  vogela [Reply | View]
  
  
  You forgot to mention ChoronoSync, a backup program I'm incredibly fond of. The big bonus here - one I haven't been able to find in other software - is the ability to look inside packages and only update the parts of a package that have been changed.
  
  This is of HUGE importance for backing up an Aperture library since the library is a package.
  
  Rather than copying hundreds or more GB's each time a backup is performed with the library, ChronoSync only copies over the few GB's that you've added since the last sync.
  
  This is of particular interest when using a service like Amazon S3 in tandem with Jungle Disk - a program that will mount your S3 space onto the desktop, making it easy to target for backup programs - since Amazon charges per GB of upload.
• Smart Handling of Packages
  2007-11-11 00:34:46  Josh Anon | [Reply | View]
  
  
  Thanks for pointing this out! It's often hard to keep up with the huge list of tools out there now to help with backup!