Problem creating new Vault on new HD

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Level 1

6 points

Problem creating new Vault on new HD

I am using AP 3.1.3 on a 17" MacBook Pro on Snow Leopard. I needed to get a new HD, as my current library is growing. I have 2x eSata drives connected by card in slot. I formatted the first drive, and copied the Library across. No problem, and I was happy to see afterwards that the previously fragmented contents were now contiguous. (Inspected with iDefrag, didn't touch them.) This is where the troubles started; I now have a new Library on a 1.5Tb drive that runs like a rocket. SO... formatted new big drive for Vault, created new Vault in AP, and off I went. I was pretty pleased to see that the copying was progressing (according to Activity monitor) at nearly 100Mb a second! After 30 hours, it ground to a halt, and although I could see some disk activity, it was obvious we weren't going to make it. I had a flash (not Adobe 🙂 ) of inspiration, and went to see Spotlight... DUH! It wasn't in the privacy setting, so activity was probably spotlight indexing. Force quit Aperture, (the Activity window is pathetic, doesn't tell you anything of value). Excluded the Vault from indexing, restarted everything, and off I went again. 100Mb/s transfer again, should be done in a few hours, certainly overnight. Got up this morning, and bu**er me, it's slowed to a crawl exactly as before. Aaaaarrrrggghhhhh!!!! 603Mb copied, 47Mb to go. SO, went to check Spotlight in the system Prefs, and sod me, the Vault has disappeared from the excluded panel!!! So; is spotlight indexing it all over again? (it's currently running at around 3Mb/s in the fast bits...)

It's a Vault, for insurance, I don't want it indexed! What the **** is going on?
This seems to be a fundamental problem, and if it weren't a Bank holiday here, I'd need my Mac to be earning it's keep. I am now approaching three days on this and nowhere near an answer. For a piece of allegedly professional software, I'm getting pretty miffed, to put it mildly. If I can't crack it in the next two days, I'm off to LightRoom.

Posted on Aug 28, 2011 11:43 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Shuttleworth125

Level 2

424 points

Aug 30, 2011 2:23 PM in response to nigelch

Hopefully a stupid question, but you did format the drives HFS+(Extended) didn't you? Also the library size you mention, ~650Mb, do you mean 650GB? If so then it would probably be better to switch to a referenced library structure, and back up the library file to a vault and the referenced images separately using a sync program like Chronosync. This will give you a much smaller library and therefore a smaller vault to back up.

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Answer 2

Aug 30, 2011 7:38 PM in response to nigelch

nigelch wrote:

For a piece of allegedly professional software, I'm getting pretty miffed, to put it mildly. If I can't crack it in the next two days, I'm off to LightRoom.

I, for one, don't care. I mention this because of the frequency with which frustrated Aperture users threaten to switch to another product, as though this threat could mean anything to the relatively anonymous and almost certainly unknown users on this user-to-user forum, which it doesn't, or that it means anything to Apple -- at one point last week the most highly valued company in the United States -- which it also doesn't. Spare us your "allegedlies", you miffedness, and your puffery -- use Lightroom if you wish, and use this forum for solving problems.

Still here?

IME, Vaults don't work well for large Libraries. Larger than 200 GB, I recommend just coping the Library to back it up. That said, the first Vault of any Library can take a very very long time to finish. (As you noted, Activity Monitor is not helpful. Aperture will show as "not responding" when it is, in fact, not only not hung, but still working.) Also IME, it is always damaging to force-quit Aperture.

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Answer 3

Neil G

Level 3

764 points

Aug 30, 2011 8:18 PM in response to Kirby Krieger

The value of a Vault is to keep the image Versions and Adjustments, the Books, the Slide Shows, etc. It's not really to keep 600+ gigs of images. If you'd like to keep another Vault on yet-another disk, you're going to have to buy another drive, instead of putting it somewhere you have some available space.

I won't directly comment on the wisdom of things that Spotlight uselessly indexes (or at least tries to), but when I've discovered it interfering with the task at hand, putting a folder or disk into the Privacy bin stops the indexing. I don't need to kill my task and then restart it.

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Answer 4

nigelch Author

Level 1

6 points

Aug 31, 2011 1:41 PM in response to Shuttleworth125

Thank you for those observations. The drives are formatted HFS+ Extended. AP3 had been running for 60 hours, and created a 645Gb Vault, when I have a 650Gb Library. Needless to say, it took over 24 hours to do the last 10Gb, then crashed. So near, and yet so far. I opened Aperture, and made one small Exposure adjustment to one picture, and then asked it to update the Vault. It has just taken 15 minutes of disk activity, but it has done it. Looks like I need a whole new strategy for my pictures, and at this late stage it may take a bit of sorting out.

Some drastic editing (euphemism for ditching shots I will never use) is probably called for. Any suggestions as to how I should proceed would be most welcome.

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Answer 5

nigelch Author

Level 1

6 points

Aug 31, 2011 1:49 PM in response to Kirby Krieger

Thank you for your patience and understanding (not). You say yourself "the frequency with which Aperture users complain..." then by your own admission, there is probably something wrong. I am not an international megacorp making a fortune out of other peoples money, I'm just an ordinary guy who is trying to make a living from his chosen profession. When my machine is tied up for days at a time doing something that on the face of it seems simple, I cannot afford software that doesn't work.

Yes, I'm still here.

As I noted above, it looks like I need an entirely different strategy for storing my pictures, and am preparing a nice pot of tea to sit down and start digesting the Aperture user manual. I'll get back to you in a week or two...

i agree it is generally bad to Force Quit any program, but when it is entirely unresponsive, what else can you do? Thank you for your help.

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Answer 6

Neil G

Level 3

764 points

Aug 31, 2011 1:56 PM in response to nigelch

A Referenced Library is strongly recommended, with a backup strategy outside of Aperture for making copies of your originals.

As for a strategy for culling your Library, you can mark images "Rejected" (keyboard shortcut is '9') as you browse your images. Then you can Filter on that rating, move them around, delete them, or whatever.

...Neil

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Answer 7

nigelch Author

Level 1

6 points

Aug 31, 2011 1:59 PM in response to Neil G

So: you are suggesting I keep the RAW files of all my original images on one drive, and make a Library separately? From this I will build a vault. hmm, that will take a minute or two...

Thank you for your observation about Spotlight; the reason I thought it may still be indexing was that despite the fact I excluded the Vault HD from indexing, there was still a lot of HD activity in Activity monitor. To my mind, one of the worst aspects of aperture is not that it takes a **** of a long time to sometimes do things, which is forgiveable, BUT that the View Activity window is as good as useless, usually showing no information whatsoever. For example, when I set off on my last epic attempt to build a 650Gb Vault, it happily showed "Copying Originals" and percentage progress. Very nice. That took about three hours, and for the next 50+ hours progress slowed to a crawl. Activity Monitor showed a lot of readin' an' writin' going on, but the View Activity window contained no information whatsoever, so I had no idea what was going on, or why it should be so resource hungry and take so long.
I am now off to read the Aperture chapter about Referenced images, no doubt I will be back!
Thank you for your time and help.

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Answer 8

nigelch Author

Level 1

6 points

Aug 31, 2011 2:04 PM in response to Neil G

Thank you, I think I know where I'm now going. Aaaarrrrggghhhhh!!!!!!
A little light bedtime reading beckons... 🙂
N

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Answer 9

Neil G

Level 3

764 points

Aug 31, 2011 2:05 PM in response to nigelch

Also turn off Faces for the time being. Preferences=>General tab. A delay upon Import is in creating the Preview images, which also can be turned off. Preferences=>Previews tab. Ultimately setting Previewa at half size, quality=6 seems okay.

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Answer 10

nigelch Author

Level 1

6 points

Aug 31, 2011 2:45 PM in response to Neil G

I've always had Faces turned off, in my view it's a tacky amateur feature much beloved by the iPhoto community, but has absolutely no place in a pro app. I always turn off everything I can in most programs to get the best out of my machine. But thanks for the thought.
N

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Answer 11

Aug 31, 2011 3:14 PM in response to nigelch

I'll tell you our referenced library set up, it may help, it'll probably confuse!!

Our Aperture Library is on its own partition of our iMacs hard drive. As it is a referenced library it contains no masters, it's only 20GB in size. There are a couple of files in the library that get fragmented a lot (APThumbnails IIRC?) we do find that doing an occasional "Quick Defrag" of this drive with iDefrag does speed Aperture up on our now fairly low spec machine, you could of course just relocate it to get a similar effect, as you have seen.

When importing our RAW masters they are directed to a 2TB USB external hard drive This drive never really gets any fragmentation, I assume Aperture doesn't really touch the masters after import, just 'look' at them. We have just short of 1TB of data on this drive.

A second USB hard drive is also attached to the computer. We nightly back up the masters from the first USB drive to this one using Chronosync, a program which does incremental backups and has a built in scheduler so you can set it to back up as often as you wish. We choose nightly in case of any unplanned deletions.

Also on the second USB drive we have a vault which we update at the end of the day. As vaults of referenced libraries contain the previews and thumbnails generated by Aperture they are usually bigger than you'd expect and still take a bit of time to update.

I rotate this hard drive with a couple of identical ones in my locker at work. (Aperture is my wifes work program, I'm just in charge of looking after the computer and backup, so it is more than my lifes worth to mess this up!!)

We have yet another USB drive attached to the iMac that has a second vault on its own partition (the other partition is a bootable backup of the main HD)

Finally the whole lot is also backed up using Time Machine to a 3TB time capsule (I fitted a 3TB drive in my 1st gen TC) I only really do this because it happens in the background and you don't notice it.

It's all probably a bit overkill, but I know backups are important and that you need more than one, our old Drobo got smashed to pieces when it was dropped during a house move, RAID doesn't help you then!!

HTH, and sorry if it adds confusion. There is a lot of good info on here about setting up a referenced library, it doesn't have to be as complicated as mine!

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Answer 12

Aug 31, 2011 3:16 PM in response to nigelch

Regarding faces, have a look at this:

http://bergsmavisuals.com/blog/apple-aperture/organization/the-cases-for-faces-i n-aperture-3/

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