While Time Machine handily restored my MacBook after it’s original Apple hard drive failed after two years, it missed one thing: 10 GB of Colorado photos, half of which I hadn’t published yet!
The reason is infuriatingly simple, yet was kept completely obscured:
Time Machine doesn’t back up your Aperture library while the application is running. This is due to the way Aperture utilizes a MySQL Lite database which needs to be open for reading and writing all the time.
A bit lame since these are both Apple products and they couldn’t make them word together (ditto for FileVault). Their real sin here, though, is that neither Aperture or Time Machine warns you of this. So I dutifully plugged in my machine as soon as I returned from vacation to be backed up, only to have it ignore not only the fancy Aperture database, all the regular image files! That’s pretty half baked, Steve.
My one consolation is that I had already published the first few days of photos, and the last day is still on my memory card. That brings my total loss to three days of photos and just about all of the RAW images and outtakes from the week.
del.icio.us/mbotos
August 27th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
[...] I always feel that a picture is worth a thousand words. I am a bit annoyed with Apple’s defective software and customer service here, and kicking myself for not backing up to the blank DVDs I had taken [...]