Corrupted .plists in History/Changes

Question

Corrupted .plists in History/Changes

In the course of dealing with some hard drive issues I ran a TechTool Pro scan on my Aperture library, and it came up with a .plist file that's corrupted. The file in question is <Aperture Library>/History/Changes/0000000002.plist. I can verify the corruption if I try to open it in Xcode, though I can open it in a text editor. The file next to it, 0000000001.plist, is fine.

I tried repairing my Aperture library, which did not fix the problem but added a third file, 0000000003.plist, which is also corrupted. Then I rebuilt my Aperture library, resulting in a corrupted 0000000004.plist.

So, what's going on and what (if anything) should I do about it? Given that I can open these in a text editor, my hope is that everything's fine and there's just something wonky about the way Aperture constructs these plists...but it would be nice to know for sure.

Thanks.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5), 8GB RAM, 500GB 7200rpm HD

Posted on Oct 4, 2013 7:36 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 4, 2013 8:33 AM in response to David Feldman1

Sure you're not talking about the Database/History/Changes/ plist files?

If so those don't seem to do a heck of a lot. I've deleted them, messed with them, etc with no affect on Aperture.

Diagnostic tools like the one you ran are OK and can sever a function if you are diagnosing a specific problem but running them on a working system will usually lead to many hits like this that are really not problems.

Now if you are having problems with Aperture or with that library then maybe it would be something to look into to. Bit if it's running OK I'd let it alone.

regards

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Answer 2

Oct 4, 2013 9:54 AM in response to David Feldman1

Nothing. Nothing is what you should do about it.

If Aperture is not reporting problems, you should NOT take the advice of Tech Tool Pro and mess with things. Data loss and issues are in your future if you do.

These tools should pretty much NEVER be used proactively.

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Answer 3

GaryB

Level 2

234 points

Nov 26, 2013 4:44 PM in response to David Feldman1

I have two seperate Aperture Libraries, one on my local internal drive and another on a Firewire connected external drive. Disk Warrior is reporting corrupted plist files on both drives under the Aperture sub-folders ....History/Changes.

As far as I can tell this is common, and anybody running a utility such as DW or Tech Tool will get these warnings. Clearly there is something about this specific plist file format that causes utilities to see them as corrupt.

I don't believe they cause a problem, and deleting them wont stop new ones from being created. Best to ignore I think.

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Answer 4

Najinsky

Level 3

670 points

Nov 26, 2013 10:40 PM in response to GaryB

They appear to be simply dumps of the history log database, almost certainly prior to pruning the history log to stop it getting too big. Can't imagine they would ever be useful for anything and are just taking up space. For me, I'd just delete them, but as a general rule I don't advise people to go rummaging through the library bundle deleting things.

One a highly active database I imagine they could grow quite large, and it would be interesting to see if they themselves eventually get pruned.

Andy

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