IPhoto not backing up properly in Time Machine

My WD external drive (should have read the reviews on Costco before buying it) failed on me and I had to restore my iPhoto library from Time Machine(TM). When I got it back there were ~250 ghost photos (black box with the file name listed). If I tried to edit the file, the screen would go blank but the photo is shown as a thumbnail at the top of the screen. Sometimes in the main photo page, as I scroll up and down of the sections where the ghost files are, they pop up very briefly and then disappear. If I try to "Show File" on one of the ghost files, it cannot find it. If I select a good picture and then use the show file option to get into the originals folder inside iPhoto, and then do a search for one of the missing files, it is not there. I have seen similar problems listed here, so this is nothing new. Luckily I had all of my photos stored as data on my iPod so I was able to import them back into iPhoto which saved the day.
Now that I am paying more attention to TM, I have noticed that if I open my iPhoto library and then open TM, I can actually see the photos that TM is backing up. Guess what.... TM is actually making ongoing backups of what is currently a perfectly good and fully populated iPhoto Library. There are ghost file photos in my TM backup that are perfectly good photos in my library right now.
Why is TM loosing these photos??? They are there in full format (not just thumbnails) right now.
In the meantime, I have resorted to making a manual "Copy and Paste" of my library every time I import new photos as I have little faith in TM. I should not need to do this. Please help.

TD, thanks. Won't drag and drop on the same disk "Move" it rather than make a copy of it?? It would on a PC.
You're copying to the same disk? That's not a back up. A back up is a copy of the data on another disk.
If you are just taking up double the space then select the Library and go File -> Duplicate., Copy and paste is fine for chunks of text, it is not good for doing anything with large amounts of data.
The TM forum for 10.6 is here:
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=263&start=0#threads
Regards
TD

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inna-help-me wrote:
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IPhoto not backing up properly in Time Machine

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