I got married late summer this year in Montana. It was a destination wedding with all of our families flying out and spending a week or more there. Needless to say the area is absolutely gorgeous (Big Fork / West Glacier area) and we were given many beautiful days. Our wedding was handled by a professional photographer, but my wife and I took about 600 shots the remaining days with our D40 and Casio Exilim.
Being a recent 'switcher' as of May I've been using Aperture and migrated all of my prior photos into the new library. I'm absolutely religious about backing up and using the vault. I backup to two different external drives and had brought one of them with me on the trip. Long story short, not fully understanding Aperture 100% at this point, I had been importing all of the photos we had been taking each day into a folder and not directly into the Aperture library as the rest of my collection. These were 'referenced' files I would later learn. I had been backing up the vault each day after importing pictures (or so I thought I was backing up). Referenced files aren't backup up using the vault feature.
So... the very last evening of the trip, after about 3/4 the way through a bottle of wine, I'm sitting there as I do each night, reviewing the pictures and what not. I'm browsing the MBP drive and noticing I'm getting low on storage (also taking a lot of video as well). I see this folder I don't recognize taking up a huge amount of space. I realize these are indeed the pictures, but thought they were also within the Aperture vault (why wouldn't they be -- everything else was) and some how just extra copies. I then proceed to.... wait for it.... delete that folder! Absolutely brilliant I know!!
It wasn't until a couple of weeks later in trying to do some edits that I realized what I had done. Since Aperture makes preview pictures it isn't apparent until you try to make changes and see all the options grayed out and that wonderful yellow exclamation mark icon I've grown to loathe appears. Absolute sheer panic and terror had set in after discovering I had fully nuked 600 pictures of memories that were of one of the biggest events in our lives.
After spending $200 or more in various disk and CF card recovery software and hours upon hours of time invested, I managed to recover about 200 of the original RAW files from one of the CF cards. Nothing was recoverable from the MBP... believe me, I tried (and tried and tried). Keep in mind it was a few weeks before I realized things were gone and using the MBP (including manipulating all those big video files I took) nearly every day, so by the time I used data recovery software that deleted data had been trashed for good.
I had set Aperture to make 'high quality' previews (much higher than default)... no idea why, just sounded good at the time. In a way that was the only silver lining of my ignorance. I still had all the previews of the missing masters. I proceeded to painstakingly begin to screen capture (in full mode) each of the 400 pictures as to have *something* to salvage of our memories. Needless to say that process absolutely SUCKED! I had gotten about half way through 400 pictures when I found a trick.
Any of you who accidentally delete or destroy your masters this is a way to get something instead of nothing...
If you have a MobileMe account Aperture will allow you to export pictures (their previews) to the web gallery even if the referenced masters are missing! You simply get a warning that the full sized images will be unavailable until they are restored to the library. It will then proceed to publish all of the 'optimized' pictures which are (in my case) the same size / quality as the previews. Once published you can download the entire album(s) zipped, delete your missing referenced pictures and re-import your 'new' masters.
This is a FAR better and faster (by order of magnitudes) method than what I was trying. Again, it's by no means like having the originals (especially if you shoot in RAW), but it's SOMETHING. I can at least make 4x6 prints with these and believe me, I'm practically rejoicing having this instead of NOTHING.
I don't wish anyone to go through this, but it might save someone else too. I've since purchased the Apple training book on Aperture and learned all about the vault system and referenced files. I try not to drink and edit either, but if I do I certainly don't delete anything!!
Wayne
Being a recent 'switcher' as of May I've been using Aperture and migrated all of my prior photos into the new library. I'm absolutely religious about backing up and using the vault. I backup to two different external drives and had brought one of them with me on the trip. Long story short, not fully understanding Aperture 100% at this point, I had been importing all of the photos we had been taking each day into a folder and not directly into the Aperture library as the rest of my collection. These were 'referenced' files I would later learn. I had been backing up the vault each day after importing pictures (or so I thought I was backing up). Referenced files aren't backup up using the vault feature.
So... the very last evening of the trip, after about 3/4 the way through a bottle of wine, I'm sitting there as I do each night, reviewing the pictures and what not. I'm browsing the MBP drive and noticing I'm getting low on storage (also taking a lot of video as well). I see this folder I don't recognize taking up a huge amount of space. I realize these are indeed the pictures, but thought they were also within the Aperture vault (why wouldn't they be -- everything else was) and some how just extra copies. I then proceed to.... wait for it.... delete that folder! Absolutely brilliant I know!!
It wasn't until a couple of weeks later in trying to do some edits that I realized what I had done. Since Aperture makes preview pictures it isn't apparent until you try to make changes and see all the options grayed out and that wonderful yellow exclamation mark icon I've grown to loathe appears. Absolute sheer panic and terror had set in after discovering I had fully nuked 600 pictures of memories that were of one of the biggest events in our lives.
After spending $200 or more in various disk and CF card recovery software and hours upon hours of time invested, I managed to recover about 200 of the original RAW files from one of the CF cards. Nothing was recoverable from the MBP... believe me, I tried (and tried and tried). Keep in mind it was a few weeks before I realized things were gone and using the MBP (including manipulating all those big video files I took) nearly every day, so by the time I used data recovery software that deleted data had been trashed for good.
I had set Aperture to make 'high quality' previews (much higher than default)... no idea why, just sounded good at the time. In a way that was the only silver lining of my ignorance. I still had all the previews of the missing masters. I proceeded to painstakingly begin to screen capture (in full mode) each of the 400 pictures as to have *something* to salvage of our memories. Needless to say that process absolutely SUCKED! I had gotten about half way through 400 pictures when I found a trick.
Any of you who accidentally delete or destroy your masters this is a way to get something instead of nothing...
If you have a MobileMe account Aperture will allow you to export pictures (their previews) to the web gallery even if the referenced masters are missing! You simply get a warning that the full sized images will be unavailable until they are restored to the library. It will then proceed to publish all of the 'optimized' pictures which are (in my case) the same size / quality as the previews. Once published you can download the entire album(s) zipped, delete your missing referenced pictures and re-import your 'new' masters.
This is a FAR better and faster (by order of magnitudes) method than what I was trying. Again, it's by no means like having the originals (especially if you shoot in RAW), but it's SOMETHING. I can at least make 4x6 prints with these and believe me, I'm practically rejoicing having this instead of NOTHING.
I don't wish anyone to go through this, but it might save someone else too. I've since purchased the Apple training book on Aperture and learned all about the vault system and referenced files. I try not to drink and edit either, but if I do I certainly don't delete anything!!
Wayne
