Making room in Aperture

fullofpaint

My hard drive on my macbook is nearly full and I desperately need to make room for new projects. I my library up to a vault on an external, would it be a good idea to simply delete all the projects I no longer need, or access frequently (they'd be backed up on the vault if necessary) and start a new vault? I don't particularly like this idea but I need hard drive space in the next day or so, and don't have the money to swap in a new internal drive yet.

CatOne

You can export the old projects to a separate drive, and then remove them from your library. Do not delete your projects and assume they're backed up in the vault, because the next time you back up to the vault the projects will be deleted from the vault as well.

Truthfully, the hard drive in a Macbook is trivially easy to replace. My suggestion would be to go get a new 1 TB drive and an external firewire enclosure, and then use Migration Assistant and you'd end up with a machine with a 1 TB internal drive for like $250 ($180 drive, $70 external enclosure). It would take 10 minutes to physically move the drives, about 30 minutes to move the OS, and then 2 hours to run Migration Assistant and copy the data over.

marchyman

What CatOne said. Select the projects to export and then go to Files -> Export -> Items as New Library... Put the new library on an external drive. When done you can delete the projects from your current library. It might make sense to create multiple new libraries. At any time you can switch libraries to get to your old projects.

rt2photo

Late to the thread, but I'll back up what the others have said. An Aperture Vault will mirror the library it's created in - you delete projects, they will leave the Vault.

I export my old projects, by year, and store them on an external USB drive (backed up to the network).
I keep my previous year or two's shoots locally on my iMacs hard drive (backed up to a second USB drive)