How to restore all aperture photos from Time Machine

I think it's time to just restore all the photos from TimeMachine/External hardrive back into one NEW single Aperture library. How do I do this?

That are two tasks that you want to do in one - restoring from Time Machine and creating a new, merged Aperture library. Ths cannot be done in one go.

You can use Time Machine to restore your two libraries from the backup. But since Time Machine does not do archival backups of photo libraries, you can only restore the last backup TM made. Depending on when you last ran TM, this may very well be the current versions of your Aperture libraries.

To restore a library from Time Machine:

• Connect the backup drive.
• In the Finder navigate to the folder with your Aperture Libraries (for example "Pictures") and open this folder as the front-most Finder Window.
• With this window selected, go to the TM icon in the Finder's menu bar and "Enter Time Machine".
  
• In the TM Time Line at the right of the TM Time Tunnel select the current backup and select the Aperture library in the Finder window. Select to "Restore to" this library to a different folder, so that you do not overwrite your current library.

Once you have restored both libraries, check, if the projects that you are concerned about are now separated again and are showing all thumbnails.

To help you to create a new, combined library from the restored library, we will need to know more. There are several options, e.g.:

• Merging the two libraries by importing one into the other.
• Exporting all your originals, project by project, and reimporting them.

What is your Aperture 3 version number? Do you have the latest version 3.4.5 or an earlier version?

How to proceed will depend on what you could recover from Time Machine.

Regards

Léonie

Restoring might take a long time, sometimes up to an hour, depending on the size of your library. But Zero bytes after an hour is unusual. Is your backup on a TimeCapsule or is the drive directly connected?