Listening to the digital story this morning prompted me to think about my Aperture setup.

Aperture has its "vault" functionality - but this only works to the local hard drive or to USB/firewire drives directly attached to the box.

I have a RAID5 based NAS (network attached storage) device which I would far prefer to have my backups on - since I've had USB disks die on me before.

How to get the vault onto the network device?

If you google for networked aperture backups - then the normal choice that comes up is to create a disk image using disk utility and have that on the NAS. This works because it appears local when mounted.

However - it is astonishingly slow (at least for me).

My approach has been to rsync the vault from a local point to the NAS via cron (nightly run).

However - I now intend to at least test out Create a Vault On a Network Drive since my NAS supports AFP although the file system is not HFS+ - we'll have to see if it works.

Update 03/10/08

Yes - it works. It is also very slow (this will of course be influenced by if you're on a 10, 100 or 1000 network - I use an 100) but it does work.

However - it also makes startup of Aperture very slow if the network drive is mounted. I'm not sure why - is it trying to compare the vault at startup?

I may return to using the rsync method or - just connect the drive when I want to update the vault - not sure yet.