A Case of the Nerves

This morning I went to dump some pictures I'd taken over the weekend into Aperture. While the software was starting up, it popped up a dialog and asked me if I wanted to rebuild my projects. Having never seen this before (and since I don't like to let software do things with important files unless I know what's going on), I told it to wait and do it later. But when Aperture opened, all of my projects were red and clicking on one of them yielded a dialog warning me that the project would be recovered.

At that point, I sort of panicked, quit Aperture, and rebooted my machine. Recovered? From what? They all worked fine last time I used the software! Once the machine rebooted, I started duplicating Aperture's photo library: before it starts making changes to my photo library, I want to make sure I can at least get back to where I am at the moment! Since the library's currently 36GB, I had to leave for work before it finished.

In parallel, I ordered a 500GB My Book external hard disk from Western Digital (not my first choice in hard disk drives, but my favorite online store didn't seem to have any Hitachi drives in external enclosures). It's been a looong time since I backed up my Aperture photo library - and this morning's oddness has given me a case of the nerves. Since the disk in that machine hosting my library is only 250GB, the external will have more than ample space to back everything up. It'll also give me something to host Apple's Time Machine whenever Leopard comes out (and I get around to having a machine that can run it - at the moment, I've a Dell Dimension running Tiger; a "Hackintosh").

At any rate, firing up Aperture after lunch did reveal that it had somehow forgotten about all of my projects. But it was able to rediscover them in the library, apparently without any loss. I'll check it over more carefully later, to be sure, before discarding the backup - but it's nice to think I didn't lose anything.