Time machine is not recognizing my existing sparse bundle

On my MB Pro with OS 10.8 I have been making backups for two weeks to a new Time Capsule 3TB. Time Machine (and my Mac) lost the ability to connect to the drive called Data on the TC. In Airport Utility everything looked fine. After some messing around (restart TC, reboot Mac, remove the Data drive in TM Preferences and then select it again as the backup disk) I find myself with Time Machine connecting to the Time Capsule, but trying to create a new backup from scratch. It appears not to be recognizing the old Sparse Bundle. Is there anything I can do to get TM to recognize the old Sparse Bundle?

Rich from 1968 wrote:
After some messing around (restart TC, reboot Mac, remove the Data drive in TM Preferences and then select it again as the backup disk) I find myself with Time Machine connecting to the Time Capsule, but trying to create a new backup from scratch.
Does it just show "None" for the backup dates, or does it actually show it's going to back up a huge amount of data?
The "None" is very misleading -- it just means the preferences window hasn't been updated (and won't be until the next backup is finished).
Did you change the setting for Secure Shared Disks (on the Disks panel of Airport Utility) to or from With Accounts"?  If so, that will cause a new backup, as they're stored differently.
Log on to an Admin account. Via the Finder, see if there are two sparse bundles, something like this (in Column View):

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