Apple: Avoid Doing Time Machine Backups or Restores During Aperture Sessions

“Running Time Machine backup or restore operations while Aperture is running may lead to inconsistencies in the Aperture database.”

Educated guess: it’s a locking problem with the database — the backupd background daemon sees the notification from FSEvents that the file has changed since the last backup, and starts copying the file, but in the meantime, Aperture is still writing to the original database file, so the backup copy gets made while the file is in an inconsistent state. This might be a problem with other apps that use a frequently updated database file.

★ Saturday, 27 October 2007