[dnanian]

They weren't trashed on the external: you're probably making a pretty common mistake with either Finder or iPhoto.

Specifically, you're likely opening the "disk" in Finder, then clicking the "Pictures" sidebar button. That's going back to the internal drive, not the backup.

Remember, too: running iPhoto "from the backup", without starting up from the backup, still looks at data on the startup drive.

Make sense?