DjMagra’s stuff ‘n’ stuff

This one has been puzzling me for a while, but, at last I think I have it figured out. I have my entire photo collection stored in a library created by Apple’s Aperture application. This contains well over 10,000 images which takes up ~42Gb of disk space. As well as containing the images themselves, the library also contains all my edits, tags, image ratings, folder structure etc. For the past few weeks, I’ve been pondering how exactly to back this data up, and keep what I have on my iMac in sync with my backup copy, which much be kept on my server off-site.
Obviously Aperture provides a means for creating backups of your library, using Vaults. The only problem with this however, is that Vaults do not like working in a networked environment and are designed to work with an external hard disk primarily. Being paranoid (which is the correct way to be!), I want to have this backup stored off-site, in case of my Mac being stolen / house burning down etc.

There is a bit of a nasty hack you can use for Aperture, whereby you create a vault on your local disk, manually copy the entire vault over to your network share, then ctrl-click on the vault in Aperture and update the drive location to point to your networked vault, and then updating the vault itself. Whilst this does actually work, I have found it is not very practical over any form of internet connection. I can get an average of about 6Mbps upstream out of my internet connection at home, and it still doesn’t work very well. The reason behind this is that Aperture likes to compare the vault and the library before doing any updates and this appears to be very bandwith intensive.

So, my most recent idea was to start using the tried and tested method of rsync to keep my local vault and my networked vault in sync. So far, so good. All appears to be working - just as expected. My vault is now rsynced with my server (which in turn is copied off to another completely separate box). Right now, I’m in the middle of restoring my networked vault to my MacBook to see if the entire process works from backup to restore. My only worry is that although there are ~10,000 images in my vault, Aperture tells me that it’s restoring library file xxx of 80003 - wtf?! I guess I’m just going to have to sit it out for a few hours and see what happens!