All my Aperture and iPhoto photos disappeared

I was getting ready to upload photos to mpix.  I was exporting photos tweaked in Aperture 3 from iPhoto.  Because the picture file to which I was exporting was full, I cancelled the export and deleted the photos in the picture file (about 790 photos).  These had been imported from iMac through drop box.  I then resumed the export of 45 photos from iPhoto and noticed some were gone.  Not sure of the sequence next, but checked Aperture and it seemed like all my projects and photos (about 9000-11,000) were gone.  Went to trash and moved dragged the photos out of the trash to the pictures drop down file in finder.  I then restarted the computer and tried to open iPhoto and it seemed there was no iPhoto library there at all.  Very strange. 
I have not backed up my macbook pro for about a week. 
Can I restore my aperture and iPhotos library?

I downloaded iPhoto Library Manager and was able to recover all the photos and albums, but not the slideshows and a recent calendar.  I would like to understand what happened though and how to avoid it in the future. So here are the answers to your questions. 
"When you say the "picture file" was full, to what are you referring?"  Several weeks ago, I had transfered a large volume of photos from my older iMac using the drop file with the computers networked. I did not delete them from the drop file after importing them into my IPhoto and/or Aperture libraries on my laptop.  After this import, neither my iPhoto nor my Aperture libraries on the laptop were comprised totally of these imported photos though.  
"An external drive?"  Although I also pulled some of the photos I had imported earlier from an external hard drive, I did not delete the files or otherwise connect (through a firewire cable) to the hard drive when I deleted the photos to prepare to upload the ones for printing. 
Over the weekend when I went to export photos to this same file I decided to delete the hundreds/thousand or so, that were still there, so that I wouldn't have to search through them all to upload them to an online printing service.  After I deleted the photos in the drop box file, when I went back to iPhoto I notice some photos were gone. Where they had been in the album I had created to print, were the empty dashed line outline box.  I don't remember if I restarted the computer then or after I checked Aperture, but at some point, thinking that might restore things, I restarted the computer.  After restarting, that's when iPhoto was just completely empty.  No photos at all.  When I checked Aperture it was the same - all the photos were gone. 
"And when you say the photos are gone, when you open Aperture, does it look like a brand new library? No images, projects, albums, etc.?" Correct. 
"Were the images in your Aperture library referenced from your iPhoto library?"  Some but not all.  Some were downloaded directly from my camera to Aperture; some were imported directly to Aperture from the drop box.  Some I did import first into iPhoto.  Also some of the photos originally imported to Aperture I then moved to iPhoto to make a calendar. 
I am very concerned about this.  Is it a software defect?  Did I do something wrong?  Is there a more efficient and less unstable way to get some, but not all of the photos from my iMac onto the laptop? 
Thanks for your help.

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