Aperture v3 Upgrade Version Checklist

This weekend I upgraded to Aperture Version 3. The process went so smoothly, I thought I would detail how I did it.

The upgrade process for Aperture isn't any different from the upgrade process for any other software. Nor even the process to upgrade from v1 to v2. The golden rule to remember is don't rush it. I know when my serial number came, I was practically drooling to "just upgrade". But I held myself back, because I knew if I did that, bad things could happen. Instead, I'd rather not be risking losing data and have a weekend where I'm pissed off. Here are the things I did to make it happen:

1. Went into Aperture, and deleted any projects/photographs that I could. The less data there is, the less time the upgrade will take.


2. Then I emptied the trashses. System, Aperture, etc.


3. Backups. I backed up everything. I backed up my OS drive, my Aperture drive. Everything. To do this I disconnected the Spolight drive, I turned the Drobo off. I also stopped Nambu (twitter), Dropbox, Evernote, etc. Then I fired up Super Duper and ran it's jobs. The process takes about 24 hours total. Not fun, but safety is priority number one.


4. Backed up the Aperture Library to as many different locations/hard drives as I could. When done, I dismounted and disconnected as many of these drives as I could.


5. Disk Utility. I ran the 'fix volume' (ie disk permissions) for each and every volume. Some consider this step as being overkill. I'd rather be safe, then sorry.


6. I renamed /Volumes/Applications/Aperture.app to Aperture_v2.app.


7. In Finder, I deleted where my Aperture Library normally was. I did this because I had 5 other copies of it, and I wanted to put the new V3 in the exact same location (ie a seperate hard drive, from my system drive).


8. Finally I downloaded, installed and ran Aperture V3. With it, I created a new v3 Library in the same location (same filename) as where the old v2 library was located.


9. Then I imported the v2 library. I started this process about 9am on Valentine's day (my wife was still asleep). By the time the evening came around (about 8pm) it had finished. To be fair, I don't know how long it took. It may have taken 2 hours, it may have taken 11 hours. I think I chose a good day to do the upgrade. I wasn't able to be on the computer at all. If I had been, I'd have probably been checking it every 5 minutes and wasted an entire day waiting for it to complete.

That's really the entire process I went through. Total time was about three days.

I don't intend to re-process many of the prior v2 projects that are now imported into the v3 library. I am doing it on the Cozumel project from our trip in December. I know I will want to edit more of those photographs (and post them to Flickr). The rest of the projects, I probably won't modify, so there is no need to reprocess them into v3.

For the curious, here's specific information:

• Aperture Library size: About 120GB


• Primary Aperture machine: Mac Pro, 2.28GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon, 10GB Ram. Filled with 1TB SATA drives. 1 4-port fw/800 Drobo, many external drives (all collected over the years).


• Backup Method: Superduper
  


• The import: I did not turn off Faces/Geo-Tagging. Both were left on. (Infact, I'm naming faces right this moment).