Aperture Question about Exporting Versions and Masters

[jbg232]

Ever since I got my DSLR and started shooting in RAW my hard drive has been eaten up by the amount of pictures I've taken. Now I need to move my entire aperture library to an external hdd and reference my entire library from that hdd and am having some trouble doing so. Here are my issues that I need help with:

1. I cannot figure out a way to export both the masters and the versions of a project into one folder. I can easily export the masters of a project but then when I hit export versions I have to hand select each of the versions (to not reduplicate the masters) and it only exports them as jpegs or whatever when what I ultimately would like to do is export my raw files in stacks with the edits I've made to them.
Example: I have a picture of a bird. My first version will have all the levels and exposure, etc adjusted. My second version will have a crop of the bird. How do I export the raw file with both the versions stacked to that file as they are in aperture now to my external hdd to re-import as referenced images?

2. I've been reading in the aperture documentation that I cannot use the vault to backup my photos. What is the best way to backup my files now that they will be on an external hdd? Time machine?

Thanks.

 

[Phrasikleia]

You need to "migrate" the project, not export masters or versions.

Yes, Time Machine is the way to go for back-up.

 

[jbg232]

I though migrating only changes the RAW decoding, but does not have anything to do with moving images.

 

[Phrasikleia]

I though migrating only changes the RAW decoding, but does not have anything to do with moving images.

I don't know here you heard that. I just migrated some 40GB of images from one drive to the other. It worked perfectly. All of the masters and versions are now located on a different drive, but they're all still associated with each other as they ever were inside Aperture.