Be Careful With Those Hard Drive Cables – O’Reilly Digital Media Blog

Be Careful With Those Hard Drive Cables – O’Reilly Digital Media Blog:

However, there’s a dark side to using external hard drives. The cables. Firewire and USB cables are easy to connect and disconnect, and that’s the rub. They’re quick to set up, but they are also somewhat sensitive to being knocked around and accidently coming undone. You don’t typically notice this much when you are using a desktop or using a portable drive with a laptop for a few minutes. But when you sit down for a few hours with your laptop and a portable drive hooked up, its so very easy to jiggle the cable loose as you move the laptop around, especially when you move it off of your laptop and onto a table so you can take a break.

This is why I decided to keep my active projects on my laptop disk, and then migrate masters out to a second drive once I’m done with them. That allows me to not need the firewire drive attached to the laptop except for migration. It is to some degree the best of both worlds, and allows you to manage, say, a 20 gig Aperture library on the local disk and avoid this problem.

I’m currently using a single Aperture library with migrated masters. I’m seriously considering moving to a model where I keep two aperture libraries, and my new/active stuff is on the laptop, and then using “export project” and “import project” to move a finished set of photos to a second library on a different disk. This would allow me to use a vault disk to store a copy of everything (right now, if you migrate the masters out of the aperture database, the vault stores the meta data, but not the masters. I hope Aperture makes that an option some day).

You could, in fact, keep an infinite number of aperture databases, on different disks, some left at home, some carried “in case”, some on the laptop disk. I’m currently considering seriously moving to a workflow where secondary images (the non-primary ones in a set) are shifted to a secondary database in case I ever want them, and only keeping my “primary/best” images active. I haven’t worked out the details of that, but it’d simplify some aspects of backing things up over migrating masters. About the only detail to worry about (and maybe not need to) is keeping the keyword lists coordinated.

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