I backed up 6000 photos from Snow Leopard iMac v.10.6 to new Western Digital External Engine "My Book." In attempting to COPY the pictures to My Book in order to free space on HD, I made a mistake. When I first dragged the iPhoto 11 Library folder to My

Question

I backed up 6000+ photos from Snow Leopard iMac v.10.6.7 to new Western Digital "My book" successfully, I think! But when I attempted to COPY my photos to it in order to free up space on my HD, I made a mistake. When I dragged the iPhoto (11) Library to My Book and re-named it to "iPhoto Library.old" nothing happened. So I dragged it again, re-named it again (same name--that was the mistake, I guess!) and then it took about an hour+ to do its thing. When finished and I launched iPhoto by holding down the Option key, the dialog window listed two libraries: "iPhoto Library.old" and iPhoto Library.old (default)". So now what? It seems that I still have the originals when I open iPhoto, and do I have two copies, also? Should I delete one of them and if so, which one and how? Or should I eliminate both of them and start over again? And if so, how do I do that? Right now, neither my HD nor the My Book have changed the number of GB available or free since before I began this process. Will the numbers only change after I actually delete my original Library AND empty the Trash? I appreciate any light you can throw on this subject for me. I could lug it all to the local Genius Bar, but now I'm afraid to unplug anything for fear I'll lose everything! Thank you, you wonderful, bright people. (An 83-year-old Grandma, trying to keep up a little, at least)

Answer 1

Oh my! Obviously, I don't know what I'm doing. But I do know that my goal was to do both---backup AND free some space. My iMAc is old (2006) and I upgraded it a year or so ago to Snow Leopard. I didn't think I had the capability of backing up without an external drive, but  maybe I do since I upgraded. Do I?
But I bought this My Book mostly for freeing space because I like to make cards in Photoshop and I'm forever running out of space when I get too many layers (don't really know what I'm doing there, either).
Is there some way that I can rectify my mistakes and start all over?
Thank you so much for  beng so prompt with your reply and patient with mine. I tried for so long to see the dialog box with the library listings. When I launched iPhoto, even with holding down the Option key, it kept immediately launching into the full screen. Finally, after an hour of doing it over and over again, it worked when I held the key down for 5 minutes. Then when I was typing my reply, I kept getting a message to "Request Time Out." Didn't know how to do that, so kept hitting the OK button and kept typing for another half minute. Finally, when ready to send, Safari couldn't do it. "Try again" exasperated me until I realized I would have to begin again and use Firefox. When I got there and ready to type, I got the message  that my message had been retrienved and did I want to use it?!!
So your kindness is very much appreciated.