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Backup Strategies with Aperture, Part Two

by Josh Anon
11/09/2007

Editor's note—In this second part of a two-part series, Josh Anon covers third-party backup tools such as RSyncX, .Mac, and Retrospect, and online options. Then he takes a look at Leopard and Time Machine to see if there's functionality there for hardcore Aperture users.

Third-Party Tools

If you want to, you can backup each project individually to an external drive or export your project and divide it up so that you can burn it to a disc. A better option is to use a third-party program such as .mac Backup, EMC Retrospect for Macintosh, or RSyncX, to backup your Aperture files. Each of these tools does their best to provide intelligent backups, similar to Aperture's vaults, but they are more flexible and allow you to backup specific folders, such as your Aperture library and referenced image folders. They also allow you to set regular backup schedules. Plus, they let you backup other critical files aside from your photos.

.mac Backup is free to .mac members ($99/year for membership), and although Apple has recently increased each member's disk quota to 10GB, that's still too small for most photographers. However, Backup is quite flexible, as it lets you use it to backup to another drive or disc and it will also allow you to schedule automatic, regular backups. It's also smart enough, when backing up to disc, to automatically span your files across multiple CDs and DVDs. Even if you choose not to make regular, scheduled backups with this tool, just having a program like this to create initial backups of your library of projects to another drive or set of discs is quite a time saver!

EMC Retrospect ($99 for Retrospect Desktop, and Retrospect Express is frequently included for free with external hard drives) has been around for a number of years. Although it's somewhat similar to .mac Backup, it is more mature and robust. For instance, in addition to providing scheduled backups to hard drives and discs, it can also backup to tape drives (which I won't cover in this article as drives, discs, and online solutions have mostly replaced tape backup for personal use).

RSyncX is one example of a set of tools for Mac OS X based on the UNIX utility rsync. Rsync is a free utility which lets you pick a source and destination and updates the destination as needed, based on what's changed in the source. RSyncX provides a graphical interface to rsync so that you don't have to type cryptic UNIX commands to create a backup copy of your Aperture library. It is not as robust as either .mac Backup or Retrospect, but it's freely available.

CDs and DVDs

Keeping in mind good backup practices, where it is smart to have backups of different formats, one great reason to pay for .mac Backup or Retrospect is their ability to burn a set of files across multiple CDs or DVDs automatically. Disco and Toast, two great dedicated disc burning tools, also provide this ability, but because .mac Backup and Retrospect provide other backup-related functions (such as scheduled backups and backups to other formats), it's worth spending the extra money for a true backup program. For disc backup, I would highly recommend burning discs project-by-project, rather than trying to backup your whole library at once. This will help keep your disc collection organized (you'll know which discs have which projects) and will make it easier to keep your backups up-to-date (just burn the new projects instead of re-burning the whole library).

Unfortunately, not all discs are created equally. As a simple example, a music CD that you buy at the store is created by stamping, but a music CD you burn from iTunes is created by lasers in your Mac burning away at the blank CD you inserted. Stamped discs last much longer, but the stamping process is typically too expensive and impractical for creating a backup. Furthermore, as you might expect, discs designed to be burned once (CD-R) tend to last longer than discs designed to be erased and rewritten (CD-RW). Beyond that, archival-grade gold discs (such as the ones Delkin makes) tend to last longer than the cheap discs you might purchase in bulk. Interestingly, CD-R discs tend to have a longer life expectancy than DVD-R discs, such as 300 years for an archival gold CD-R versus 100 years for an archival gold DVD-R. If you're backing up to disc, I recommend burning at least two copies and also checking your backup discs every year or so and re-burning them as needed. This might be a bit overcautious, given the 100+-year life expectancy of most discs, but with backup, it's better to be safe than sorry!

Online Backup

A newer, interesting form of backup is online backup. From a photographer's perspective, these solutions fall into two categories: general backup, where you essentially create an online hard drive, and photo-specific backup, where you can also create galleries and potentially sell images. General backup includes services like Amazon's S3 and Mozy. With both, you pay a certain amount each month ($0.15 per GB plus data transfer fees on S3, and $4.95 for unlimited data storage and transfer with Mozy) for the site to host your data in an encrypted format. If you are transferring a lot of data to and from the service, Mozy will most likely be cheaper. However, the only software client for Mozy is the one they provide. S3 has a number of third-party tools to upload and retrieve data.

As you might expect, the clients for these general backup services are similar to other backup programs. You select which files or folders to backup, and the software does the rest. The benefit to these sites are that you can upload your entire library or set of projects, including all metadata and versions, so that if something bad happens to the primary copy, you can easily retrieve everything. Plus, you can backup other general files, such as sales records, with these tools.

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