Aperture libraries corrupted?

[B.Smith357]

Was doing some spring cleaning and tried to consolidate all my Aperture libraries to one drive. That drive happennd to be formatted in ExFat and now my libraries won't open. Did some research and found that ExFat and Aperture don't play nice and trying to push all my libraries back to an MacOS Extended formatted drive, but all I get is "Preparing to copy Aperture Library" in my progress bar that just seems to spin.
Folders and files seems to transfer fine, but my libraries just spin and sputter for hours.

Did I just corrupt all my libraries and lose about 20 years of photos?

 

[Fishrrman]

For a Mac running a Mac app, file storage should ALWAYS be to "a Mac formatted drive" -- either HFS+ or APFS (I recommend HFS+ for external drives that ARE NOT going to be used as boot drives).

What I would try if you gave the problem drive to me:

First, you're going to need CarbonCopyCloner.
Get it from here:

Download CCC - Bombich Software

www.bombich.com

CCC is FREE to download and use for 30 days -- this costs you nothing to try.

Next, prepare the "target" drive:
Connect it and use Disk Utility to erase it to Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format.

Now, connect the "problem drive".

Now, launch CCC and set it up to "clone" the contents of the problem drive to the target drive.
Accept all of CCC's default settings.
Put the problem drive "on the left"
Put the target drive "in the middle"
Leave the "box on the right" (scheduling) alone -- you don't need this.

When you have that set, click "clone" and click through.

See if CCC can copy the files to the target drive.
CCC will keep "forging ahead" when the finder fails.
This is why I'm suggesting this process.

Try it, and report back here with your findings.