Aperture 3 and Remote Library Management

Hallo Graham,

that is a tricky question you have posted. The best way to do what you want will depend on the circumstances you will find when you are travelling, as well as on the data rate you require.

How big are your projects? Hundreds of huge RAW images or only a selected few?

Are you travelling in well develloped regions with good and reliable internet connections, or are we talking of the outback, with no reliable internet and only two hours of electricity supply a day, and having to rely on your batteries?

If we are talking about travelling to well develloped urban areas, with good quality internet, then the procedure you describe will work very well, I think. You will be able to transfer whole projects, even with huge file sizes.

If you have a poor internet connection however, or the power going on and off intermittendly, I do not think you will be able to reliably transfer whole projects at once, you will have to do it in easy installments, and check each file afterwards, if the transfer was successful.

Also it worries me a little bit, that you made no mention of backing up your images on site, or have I misunderstood your post? I never would rely on the images transferred by internet as the only backup, if you are not able to convince yourself that the transfer was o.k.

Regards

Léonie

I think both options are good, and I would recommend to keep both options open, when you are on the road. It would be preferable to get the images directly to your computer using 'Connect As...', but as your machine at home might crash, with nobody at home to boot it again, it might come in handy to have a drop box as well.

You could have a look at "Back to My Mac" screen sharing. I think it's still supposed to work under iCloud, it worked well in MobileMe.

I think it's still supposed to work under iCloud, it worked well in MobileMe.

Yes, it is still available.

I've just re-read your suggested procedure and you are basically already suggesting BTMM 😊, so I'm agreeing with you, that should be a good way to do it !! (I could never get an internet connection that would cope with it, we get less than 2Mbps here).

I tried to copy our library to iDisk once, but it only allows a maximum 2GB file size, so that was no use.

As regard backup, my wife dropped our Drobo earlier this year and cabbaged the hard drives, redundancy isn't always a perfect back-up! On the rare occasions we travel we make a vault of our library on an external drive and keep it seperate from the laptop, just in case. If you were to do this as well as backing up to home-base it'd give you three seperate backups in two locations which is a pretty secure backup.