Aperture 3.5.1 not playing well with Time Machine

léonie wrote:

How did you restore the library? From the Time Machine Star wars display with "restore", or did you drag the library over using the Finder? A photo library needs to be restored. And after restoring I'd repair it, if photos are missing, see: Repairing and Rebuilding Your Aperture Library: Aperture 3 User Manual

The "repair" may take a very long time for a large library, so don't interrupt it. When it's finished, look for a "Recovered" project. Sometimes Aperture will collect orphaned images in a special projec.

How: Upon the first launch of the laptop with its new HD, it asked if I wanted to restore via Time Machine. I clicked yes. The whole process probably took an hour. For some reason, the restore gave me 10.7, which is odd since I'd been using Mavericks and Snow Leopard before that. I upgraded to Mavericks via the App Store and I was set.

So ... upon initial inspection, after the Time Machine restore from scratch, I noticed that my Aperture library was missing the newest five months. I then deleted that library and manually dragged the archived library over to my "pictures" folder. After booting up Aperture, the library still was missing five months' worth of photos.

I then trashed that library and dragged over the second-newest archived version, thinking that perhaps the newest archive had some kind of issue. Same problem.

Frank Caggiano wrote:

When I restored via Time Machine, everything was perfect except for my Aperture/iPhoto library. No photos from the past five months were included in the library for some reason.

Were the projects, albums, folders , etc from the last 5 months also missing or were only the images missing?

And if it was only the images were the previews and/or thumbnails ok or were they missing also?

I'm missing everything -- projects, albums, folders, thumbnails. It as if the pics simply weren't there.

Thanks to both of you for responding!

I am now following the repair/restore protocols outlined in leonie's link. Will let you know how that goes.

léonie wrote:

I'm missing everything -- projects, albums, folders, thumbnails. It as if the pics simply weren't there.

Thanks to both of you for responding!

Do you have TIme Machine always running in the background, or do you only occasionally connect the drive?

I only connect to the drive occasionally; maybe once per week. I use the pull-down menu for Time Machine and manually trigger a backup.

OK. So here's the latest update: Good news!

Leonie's link did the trick. A bunch of "new" photos appeared!

Since I used an "old" backup instead of the newest one, though, I'll need to re-start this process from the beginning to get all my photos back. However, I know this system works and will resuscitate "lost" photographs. I'll check back when I get the correct library loaded and restored. Thanks so much, you two.

Latest update: I am in great shape!

Repairing the photo library brought everything back. There are tons of duplicates, so I'm having to run Duplicate Annihilator to clean everything up, but I have at least one copy of every photo I had.

I am very grateful to both of you for your assistance. Thank you so much!

I will ask this: Is there a better way to remove duplicates than running the Annihilator program?

That's a wrap. My library is fully restored, duplicates thrown away, now being backed up as part of a happy new hard drive.

Thank you so much, leonie and Frank Caggiano. You were clutch!