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I wanted to create a second Aperture Vault on a hfsplus volume, but hosted on my network. I could do this using Disk Utility, but due to some complications in the way my Linux Samba server is setup I needed to create the disk images on my Linux server directly.

In this case I am creating a 160GB volume named 'APV.dmg' to match the size of the external firewire drive I use with Aperture.

The following command will create the empty disk image:

dd if=/dev/zero of=APV.dmg bs=1M count=163840

Then to format it as a hfsplus volume:

mkfs.hfsplus -v 'Aperture Vault' APV.dmg

I test copied some files over my LAN (gigE) to this volume when it was mounted on my Mac, and the speeds are equivalent to an external firewire drive. That is, they are limited by the 5400rpm 2.5" SATA drive in my laptop rather than any other component.

I recently created some .dmg files using Disk Utility on my Mac system. I placed these files on my Linux server which hosts them to the network via Samba. The advantage of mounting the .dmg files is that I can use a native Mac file system, which means I can store Aperture vaults on there as well as have these locations indexed/journalised by Spotlight.

I wanted to ensure that I would be able to read the data on these disk images if I was Mac-Less, but most guides indicated I should use the following command:

mount -t hfs -o loop /directory/location_of_dmg.dmg /mnt/mountpoint

This gave errors about bad filesystem type...

It seems later versions of Mac OSX use a filesystem recognised by Linux as "hfsplus", so the following command is required:

mount -t hfsplus -o loop /directory/location_of_dmg.dmg /mnt/mountpoint

This way in case of some disaster which leaves me with no Mac system, I can still retrieve/recover data from the Mac disk images!