I am using Aperture 3.4.3. I have a fully managed Library on 3 drives in my older Mac Pro and my backup Vault is on a large external drive. I use a MacBook Pro when I travel and merge the travel Libraries into my MacPro when I get home. That has always worked fine.
I discovered yesterday that a number of images have disappeared from the Library. I was looking for some images in my 5 star smart album and they were gone. I'm not exactly sure when it happened or how. They disappeared from Projects where other images still remain. I checked to make sure I didn't have a filter on and don't think I do. Some of them were rated and some of them had done the round trip to Photoshop. I thought I must have done something unintentionally like mass selecting and command/deleting. But I couldn't find the images in the trash.
So I opened the Aperture Package in the Finder. Lo and behold the images are in there. In other words, the files are in the managed Aperture Package on the disc but they do not show up in the Library when the application is open. I think they are OK because under the file info it says the files are 70 MB, the size of my D800 RAW files. So I am hopeful that this can be solved.
I wonder if I should run Repair Permissions or Repair Database. I've never done that before so I am a little apprehensive about it.
I also wonder if I should update my Vault. I suppose I should do that before doing any kind of repair. But I don't know if that will make the problem less retrievable. Looks like I last updated it 3 days ago after I had done some housekeeping of my files. I've only worked on 2 or three images since then and think the lost file problem happened before I updated the Vault.
I suspect the restore from Vault is another option. I hope the above is a better option because my Library is 1.6 TB and it would take forever.
Help
I did find the missing images in the Aperture Trash. I had initially found them when I inspected the masters folder in the package contents of my managed Aperture Library on the hard disc. For the uninitiated you get in there by right clicking on the Aperture Library icon (by default in the Photos folder on your Mac) and select the “show package contents”. You can then navigate to the Masters folder which appears to be organized by month and year. But don’t fool with anything in there.
Then I searched for file name in Aperture and the whole computer. Looked in the system trash. Nothing. Tried “Repair Permissions” and “Repair Database”. No success.
I had forgotten that there is a Trash icon in the Library tab of the Inspector in Aperture and that it empties into the system trash when you empty it from the Aperture menu, whew … And there they were.
I have no idea how they got there. Unless there is a bug in Aperture, the only explanation is that I somehow selected a large range of images by accident and then pressed command delete … puff
Wasted a few hours on that but got my images back.