Time Machine backups and restore

I recently had to erase and start over again on my computer, as the hard drive had been case-senstive journaled and this would not allow me to install Adobe Creative suite. So I changed that and rebooted my imac. I have Time Machine and a 2tb My book as a external hard drive. When I set this up and pretty much brought me through some settings and quite quickly it was backing my computer up every hour and so forth. Now I thought this meant that it was quite literally Saving everything every hour, and when it got full it would delete the oldest back ups. In this saving I thought it meant photos, music, documents, spreadsheets, my quickbooks everything. Without me having to specify.

But I restored my computer, and I only got the applications, no photos, music, files, documents, spread sheets, quickbook numbers. Just the programs themselves; itunes, iphoto, imovie, microsoft word, excel, quickbooks.

Did I make a HUGE mistake and lose all of that information??????????

or

am I just not seeing the folders in my time machine backup and if that is the case, WHERE IS EVERYTHING??????????

I am in serious panic mode so any advice is APPRECIATED!

Time Machine will backup everything by default except if you make exclusions. Select Time Machine from System Preferences and click on the "options" box. Is anything showing up when the exclusions dialog opens?

When i bring up the options it says exclude these items from backups: and listed just says time machine backups 118.12 GB and that is it.

So I am assuming that Time Machine has in fact saved all of my photos, docs, music and what not. Now the question is where the heck are they inside of time machine?!!

If there were no exclusions listed, it should have backed everything up. Keep in mind that Time Machine only makes a full backup the first time it's run. Subsequent backups will only backup those items that have changed. Did you have more than one account on the machine before erasing? If not, don't worry about it.

Can you open your latest Time Machine backup and scan through it to see exactly what it shows? That should be the last backup you made before erasing the hard drive.

Unfortuntely Time Machine did not in fact back up my entire "collection" if you will. Since I have restored my computer, on the last 3 days worth of back ups everything looks the way it should and everything is there... But when I go back in time to say a week ago, the only thing it backed up was my applications. Which is worthless, because I have a disk of all my applications. It wasn't what I needed, I needed my docs, photos, music etc. to be backed up....

So I again have lost everything off my computer. Fantastic.

If you connect to your Time Machine disk using Finder and go into the " sparsebundle " file ( which is your backup ) can you see the photo,' doc's etc......
If you can see them there, then they are on your backup and can be restored.
Over the last 3 years, I have used Time Machine and restored load's of data of it and never lost a single file.