Aperture Updating Library... 126,637 of 6,959,575

Question

Hello all,
I upgraded to Aperture 3.2.3 and got an unexpected "Recovering Library" when it first started. Well, it seemed to have worked, and I did some importing in Aperture. It also started doing facial recognition in the background. I let all the background stuff finish, and then yesterday I quit Aperture.
At that time, it popped up a panel/sheet saying Updating library... 1 of 6,959,575 (commas added by me). It had done Updating Library in the past so I didn't think much of it.
However, now, a day and a half later, it is only up to 126,767 of those nearly 7 million. It seems to be going at a rate of one per second. At this rate, it will take around 80 days to finish. Given that my computer is a MacBook connected to an external DroboPro, that means I'm stuck with a non-portable computer that I have to hope has absolutely no crashes nor power failures nor any other hiccoughs for three months. Clearly, this is unacceptable.
Does anyone have any ideas what's going on here and what I could do, please?
Thanks,
Doug

Answer 1

If you have not read and undertstood this, you should: http://photo.rwboyer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Aperture3Organization.pdf
This will tell you how to open the Library Package and determine how large your Masters, Thumbs, and Previews are.
Some other thoughts:
How full is your system drive on your MacBookPro? If it does not have between 25 and 30% free space, then that is the first thing you have to fix. Similarly, I assume that you have run Disk First Aid or Diskwarrior against your system drive, just be be sure that it is not, for any reason, hosed. From your comments about Lion, I would guess that:
-- Your OSX installation has real problems; problems that probably rate a visit to the Genius Bar; there should be one near you in New York.
-- Your Aperture rebuild may be having problems with latency - possibly because the catalog of your system disk is damaged or your Lion install is damaged. Couple that with the slow speed of the Drobo and things may be timing out. I will admit that this is a complete shot in the dark.
Assuming that your 2 TB Library is Managed, that is that the 2 TB includes your masters, and that you do not have 2 TB of free space in your MacBookPro, then:
-- First relocate your Masters out of the Managed Library and put them somewhere on the Drobo. There re many, many threads on this Forum discussing strategies for doing this.
-- Move the Library (now without Masters) onto your fastest, emptiest internal drive.
-- Resync everything. A quick pass with iDefrag wouldn't hurt after this much file movement.
Why lecture about backups?
-- Well, first of all you said that you had no backups.
-- Secondly, we are trying to diagnose a problem at a distance, on hardware that we cannot see. We can't really tell if your problem is with your Mac, Lion, the Drobo, or Aperture. Under those circumstances we could easily give really bad advice. The cyber version of the Hippocratic Oath (First, do no harm.) is to assure that backups are available.
Good luck and best wishes.
DiploStrat