First off, your site is quite an excellent resource. Well done and keep up the good work! I have one question, which I'm hoping you know the answer to. I'm trying to move my Vault over to a network drive, but Samba doesn't seem to be able to handle the : characters inside the .appproject packages. Did you ever encounter this problem? If so, how did you get around it? If not, have you any ideas how I would get around this?

If the filing system were NFS+ and the connection AFP (Appletalk) then the answer would be in the article Network Vaults that describes how to create a vault on a server when Aperture refuses to allow it. However the question at hand is how to handle a file server running Samba (SMB/CIFS), and possibly a foreign filing system like NTFS where there are problems with the file names.

The answer is to create a disk image on the server and put the vault inside that. Exposing Aperture to a filing system that cannot handle the Mac path names results in errors like this:

By creating a disk image on the server the server sees a single large binary file and the Mac sees a complete HFS+ filing system.

There are two types of disk image that could be used for this: standard are sparse. A standard disk image (.dmg) has a fixed image file size and a fixed capacity. It behaves just like a regular physical disk. A sparse disk image (.sparseimage) has a fixed capacity, but its image file size varies with the amount of data it is holding. The one catch with sparse disk images is that they don't get any smaller when data is deleted from them. In either case, when the disk is full, you have to create another, bigger one. Both types of disk image can also be encrypted.

I recommend using a sparse disk image. Create one on your server by launching Disk Utility. Make sure nothing on the left pane is selected and then select File > New > Blank Disk Image.

Select sparse disk image from the pop-up and then specify the size. Pick something that is big enough to hold what you will need for the foreseeable future, but not so big that it will cause problems on your server when it is full-sized. Be aware that Aperture requires quite a lot of space held in reserve to be sure that it can write or update a vault.

If you want to encrypt the disk, do so. You can store the key in your keychain if you like. But make sure you don't lose the key or you will lose your data forever:

Navigate to your server and create the image there. Once you have created your disk image you will have a file that looks like this:

Even very large sparse disk images are small to start with. A 100GB sparse disk image is tens of MB in size when empty. To use the disk image, you must mount it. Just double-click it and it will appear on your desktop with your other drives:

Now you can create your vault on that mounted disk image drive:

Giving it a sensible name:

To unmount the volume, control click and select unmount. If you drag to trash, be careful to drag the volume to the trash, not the sparse disk image file to trash.

When your vault becomes too big for your sparse disk image delete it by deleting the sparse image file and emptying the trash. Now create a new bigger image with the same name and create a new vault on it.

Tags: Aperture, Vaults, Networking, Samba, Q&A, Disk Images