Time Machine woahs

So I decided to do a little mass cleaning and restore- heres what i did- i delete d all the stuff i didnt need and cleaned up some files. next In time machine i excluded system files then I backed up- after backing up i inserted my snow lepoard disk and partitioned my main harddrive and then i tried a few ways of getting my files back on. I installed snow lepoard and then tried to restore with my back up- no go, never found it, so i skipped that and just booted it up and went into migration assistant- that was useless. slowly i discovered that when the disk is connected I can see one part of it all thats in it is a macbook.sparsebundle> BUT if i connect and start backing up i can see a new partition named TIME MACHINE BACKUPS so i oopen and navigate to the one i want but i cant copy it back because after the back up iis done it goes away. I try recovering with time machine and it doesnt see it. SO how can i have all the files in the backup folder on my computer on a new snow lepoard keeeping in mind the system files arent in that backup

My guess is that you have not re connected to original sparse bundle per this;

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How about doing it the easy way and use SuperDuper or similar.

Bit of info here on back up choices. Check out McBies comments.

How did you get that message?

I would use superduper- wouldnt that require me to still have the files on the computer

mjb94 said:

How did you get that message?

I would use superduper- wouldnt that require me to still have the files on the computer

Click to expand...

1 - Just select 'Enter Time Machine' in MenuBar drop down and if it cannot find the sparsebundle it expects it brings up that window.

2 - SuperDuper makes a mirror copy of current computer HD on external of your choice. No need move individual files and will do a Smart update once you have done initial copy meaning only new ones are added/changed.