Performing Manual Backup

You can perform your Aperture backup manually, using any of several techniques. If you want to back up your entire library, you can simply drag the Aperture Library document to another drive. However, it's better to use Aperture's vault system for this purpose, because your future backup operations will be much faster, thanks to the vault system's progressive backup architecture.

Using the Export Versions command that you learned about in the previous chapter, you can export your final images to any drive, or export them and then burn them to a CD or DVD. Similarly, you can use the Export Master command to export your original images for backup and archiving.

However, because versions are final, rendered files, you won't be able to go back later and adjust any of your edits, and your master images won't have any adjustments applied to them. Remember, your edits are stored in the version files kept within your Aperture projects, so to create a backup that preserves the editability of your images, you need to back up your Aperture projects.

You can back up a project by selecting it in the Projects pane and then choosing File > Export Project. The entire projectversions, masters, books, albums, and any other objectswill be written to a file.

You can also export a project by dragging it from the Projects pane to the Finder.

To import a project into Aperture, either drag the project file from the Finder to the Projects pane or choose File > Import > Projects. Aperture will copy the project into your library.

Tip

If you need to move a project to another Mac running Aperture, using the export and import project features is the best way to do it.

Tip

Aperture does not preserve custom orders when you export a project. If you want to place images in a custom order and ensure that this order is preserved when you export a project, place the images in an album and order them there.