Some iPhoto pictures missing after time machine recovery, were there errors reported during backup that I missed?

Hello. I used time machine/time capsule to automatically back up my sytem over the last 3 years and I used the backups to recover my system to a new hard drive when the original drive began to fail. After recovery, I noticed there are missing photos in iPhoto.
I'm curios where I should look to see why they weren't backed up, and why it wasn't obvious to me at the time that they weren't backed up.
Does time machine explicitly call out issues when it can't back up a file or does it just squirrel a message away in the system log?
I'd like to know because I'd like avoid this issue going forward.
Full disclosure & History -
The hard drive on my late 2009 27" iMac was exhibiting issues and started to go bad. No problem I thought, I'll get a new one and recover the system from my time capsule.
The full recovery was initiated from the OS install media. Upon recovery, the system wouldn't boot. After booting from the OS install media and reinstalling the OS on top of the recovered data the system booted and seemed to retain almost everything. This may not be the best way to recover but it seemed to work.
I additionally had to:
repatch the OS
reinstall iWork
relicense MS Office (otherwise office seemed to be intact)
When I started looking through my iPhoto libraries, there were some events with no pictures (mostly the newer events). I couldn't find the pictures on the time capsule either so I'm curios if there was anyway I could have known that backups weren't completing successfully. I had run a time machine incremental backup before pulling out the old hard drive and it seemed to complete successfully so I'm at a loss. I can understand that as the hard drive began to fail, there may have been issues backing up the data, but I somehow missed it if/when the problems were reported.
Should I go through the old system logs that were backed up on the time capsule and look for backupd messages/errors? Going forward, how do I know if there are backup issues?
It took me a couple weeks to realize the drive was failing. I had noticed that the system performance was getting bad, and the system would occassionally hang. It would come back OK after a restart. I thought it was because the filesystem was getting close to full (30GB left on a 1 TB drive) so I was chasing down cleaning up some data to make more room. There were suggestions in other forums to try and keep the filesystem 10% free.
While moving data from the internal drive to a new external drive (to free up space) the system would hang. I eventually found a couple disk0 errors in the kernel log and I actually witnessed disk0 disappear while running an iostat. I'm thinking it took me too long to know the disk was going bad, and so the pictures I imported over the last 3-4 weeks may be gone.
I still have the original drive so I'll see if anything else can be salvaged from it.
Looking for some suggestions on
1) the ability to know if time machine backups are successful and are in sync with my system
2) the ability to know when there are hardware issues that I should be aware of
If you got to this point, thanks for taking the time to read through all this.
Regards,
-mike

Hi Mike,
I just saw this post and saw no one has responded.  You might have figured out but in case, I wanted to let you know what I found out.  I had the same problem.  Hard drive failure, they installed a new one and my iPhoto pictures were missing.  I couldn't find them on Time Machine either which baffled (and frustrated) me b/c I just backed up my drive and I was missing pictures from over a year ago. 
I found this article and it allowed me to at least find my pictures...so they weren't lost after all. 
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16029742#16029742
As for why they aren't showing up in iPhoto or Time Machine, the lady at the Mac store said it is probably an OS conflict.  Which makes sense since I can see the actual pictures in the iPhoto content file (per the article mentioned above).  However, I didn't have my computer with me at the store to have a Genius person help me resolve the conflict.
BUT, if you can find the pictures, then maybe you can reimport them into iPhoto?  Just a thought.
Good luck!

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