I have been using Carbon Copy Cloner for years with great success … which up until recently was free or donation ware … I have heard good things about Chronosync as well.

Both options do a great job of duplicating your exact file/folder structure of your working drive to your backup drive … as well as building bootable clones of your computer’s startup drive. If your working copy would fail, you can just point Aperture to your backup and continue on with your work.

Backups can be scheduled and run in the background, or manually invoked as needed. You can even set up a scheduler in CCC to begin on each occasion when a drive is attached. I would assume Chronosync would have a similar feature. For example, both my working and backup drives are online to my system much of the time. I also keep a duplicate set of drives off site that are backed up weekly oe as needed after large or very important shoots. I use a SATA drive dock and plug in the dives as needed and when they mount, CCC initiates the backup for that drive. When that drive is done, I eject that drive and move on to the next drive.

I think both options come in at around the $40 range and are well worth the investment.

You could let Time Machine handle the referenced files, too. That also makes it easy to visually surf through different versions back in time.

Bob

I echo Butch’s comments from the Chronosync side. I use it to clone my referenced photos to an external Raid 5 drive, and backup my library. It can be scheduled, maintains archives of deleted files for a specified time, and can be used to incrementally backup your Aperture library, similar to the Vault but on a schedule. Not sure about Time Machine backups of your library…there used to be issues with that approach. Maybe the problems are fixed, maybe not. I exclude Aperture libs from Time Machine just in case.

I think Time Machine is a great option for a live backup of your startup drive … but for many users it isn’t such a great option if you have a large amount of referenced images on multiple external drives. Secondly, while you could use Time Machine to restore your referenced files … you really can’t easily or efficiently access the images from the TM backup itself … whereas, if you have an exact duplicate for your backup and the working drive would fail .. you can continue your work without issue employing the backup drive …

Heck, if you change the backup drive name to your failed working drive name … you don’t even have to “Relocate Masters” in Aperture … Depending upon how many images you would lose to a drive failure … it could take many hours … even a day or two to restore a working drive to the point where Aperture would be back up to speed …

SuperDuper! is another alternative & the one I use having switched off TM altogether. I schedule it to run once a day, every day when I’ve finished bashing pixels & usually run an unscheduled backup if I’ve done a lot of work in one go.

In fact, I think that TM causes more than a few problems with it running so frequently & I’m pretty sure that it’s one of the factors involved in the recurrent problems we’re seeing in Aperture & L****room.