So, I’ve done something stupid. I obviously managed to delete about 200 of the best (RAW) photos from my sons first 18 months. I have a library of about 50 000 photos, sorted in folders  Year -> Month  and projects for each “shoot”. Once in a while I want to collect some photos for a book, a slideshow, to publish online or something like that. My originals are referenced from two external drives. Everything locally and external is backed up to Backblaze. A lot of my originals are also in two copies on two drives, but sadly not those from the last two years. Full resolution, edited versions are nicely sorted in albums on Smugmug, so I haven’t lost the JPEG, only the RAWs. 

What I think did wrong was that I created an album which was placed in the bottom of the library view in the Inspector (under Albums). I thought I copied the originals to a new location, and that this was safe. Clearly it wasn’t. Because of a mixup I had to delete one version of the album, which then deleted the originals (which was spread across two different drives, in different folders). This was four months ago, so Backblaze wont do any good, since it delete files after a month (I regret a second now for not switching to Crashplan). 

I’m going to use an app to setup an rsync between to external drives for regularly sync with my originals. This is not going to happen again. 

But now for the question: 

What is the best way to gather and collect a lot of photos, fast, safe and easy, inside Aperture? In most cases I want a new version of every photo, since I might want to edit the photos especially for the print/export. 

Any good tips?