By design, vaults are supposed to be stored on Firewire or other local, directly-attached drives. But this does not take into consideration all the people with large, fast servers and NAS systems who want to use those as backups for local library storage.

Here is how to create a vault on a network drive. This article applies only to storing a vault on a server with an HFS+ filing system accessed via Appletalk (AFP), such as another Mac or an XServe. Other situations require a different approach (see the Question and Answer page).

First I will attempt to create one and see what goes wrong. I go to the vault pane lower left and add use the action (cog) menu to create a new vault. I can have as many vaults as I like for my library, allowing me to keep drives off site and rotate them if I wish.:

The Add Vault dialog comes up, so I navigate to my server and try to create the vault:

But Aperture does not like what I am trying to do:

So I have to work around the check that is being made. Instead of trying to create the vault on the server I will create it locally and then copy it to the server. First I create a vault on my desktop and it appears in the vault pane:

Then I quit Aperture and copy the vault from the desktop to the server. The vault on the desktop is no longer needed, so I trash it -- but I get an errorr if I try to do that:

It is locked. Vaults are locked as a precaution against accidental deletion. I must unlock it first by selecting the vault on my desktop, hitting command I to get the information window, and then deselecting the Locked checkbox.

Now the vault icon has lost its little lock badge:

And I can drag it to the trash and empty the trash. But I am not quite done yet, because Aperture does not yet know about the vault that is on the server. If I launch Aperture and look at the vault pane:

I see that Aperture cannot locate the vault. To tell Aperture where the vault is located, I select the vault and select Update Vault Path from the action menu:

Now I can navigate to the vault on the server to update the path:

And Aperture is happy and can use it:

Finally I can back up my library to the new vault.

There is a new warning in Aperture 1.5 about backing up managed and referenced masters:

This is a very useful warning if I expected all my masters to be in the library, because it is telling me that not all of them will be backed up to a vault. Finding all referenced masters is easy: I click on the library and bring up the filter dialog. Select File Status from the + menu (and maybe set the rating to Rejected and Better):

And then select Referenced from the File status pop-up:

If I wish, I can save this as a Smart Album for immediate use as well.