DISASTER - lost all Aperture masters! Can I get the preview jpegs?

strikeman said:

Recently had total disaster. My backup disk started flaking out. I reformatted, but before I could backup again, the disk containing all my Aperture masters died! I was able to restore some of the masters from an older backup, but there are still a lot of photos which have now disappeared to photo heaven.

However, since Aperture kindly generated previews for all of my photos, I actually have decent quality jpegs even of these lost photos. My question is, can I at least export these jpegs so I have something I can share with my friends?

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If you show the contents of the aperture library in finder, I am pretty sure you will find your previews. iirc though, the filenames are not ideal. Good luck.

strikeman said:

the disk containing all my Aperture masters died!

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Died in what way? Depending on the cause of death, revival is anything from possible to easy. I've done lots of disk recoveries from the freezer trick to swapping out the controller boards- as long as it's not a motor or a head crash there's at least a chance of getting it back without serious expense.

I would try to recover them off the reformatted disk before doing anything else with that disk. Reformatting should not get rid of the files themselves. Leave something like scandisk recovery software running on the disk for a few days.
I would also bin the backup disk afterwards. In my experience when a disk starts to do odd things its the start of the end. Better to get everything off and replace it. Disks are cheap.
Start looking at your backup strategy from now on. These days I have 3 copies before erasing CF cards. I have 2 copies in a RAID mirror and one off-site backup on an automated backup routine.

Oh, on previews, as others said, you can browse the aperture library for the jpg files. You can't export from aperture but you can grab a preview from aperture and drag and drop it onto the desktop

strikeman said:

However, since Aperture kindly generated previews for all of my photos, I actually have decent quality jpegs even of these lost photos. My question is, can I at least export these jpegs so I have something I can share with my friends?

Click to expand...

I believe that if you import the photos into iPhoto using the "Show Aperture Library" feature, it imports the jpg previews created by Aperture, not the masters, so you should be able to quickly recover the previews.

And definitely try the freezer trick to see if you can resuscitate the dead drive.

strikeman said:

Recently had total disaster. My backup disk started flaking out. I reformatted, but before I could backup again, the disk containing all my Aperture masters died! I was able to restore some of the masters from an older backup, but there are still a lot of photos which have now disappeared to photo heaven.

However, since Aperture kindly generated previews for all of my photos, I actually have decent quality jpegs even of these lost photos. My question is, can I at least export these jpegs so I have something I can share with my friends?

Click to expand...

You only had one copy of your masters on a back-up disc?

Then it wasn't the back-up disc, but the original, and you had none on your main hard drive?

What kind of hard drive was it?

It could just be the enclosure. Take drive out, put it into new enclosure, and maybe it works. A good many a time it's the enclosure that fails, not the drive.

Or is it such a cheap drive?

PS: back-up means: a copy, a second file to back up the first.

Thanks

glennp said:

I believe that if you import the photos into iPhoto using the "Show Aperture Library" feature, it imports the jpg previews created by Aperture, not the masters, so you should be able to quickly recover the previews.

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I know this is an old thread, but in case anyone else has this problem...

@glennp, this worked for me... Long lost drive, pictures in Aperture previews only. THANK YOU FOR THE IDEA TO EXPORT TO IPHOTO. I only had to drag them into iPhoto, and I could export them from there... even kept basic metadata.