Time machine problems on clean-install, doesn't recognize old backups as such/permissions issues

My iMac had been pretty slow, and never received a clean install since I'd gotten it. With the security that I'd just restore whatever I wanted from Time Machine afterward, I used the recovery partition to format the hard drive and install Lion.
Everything's fast now! It's remarkably like it was when it was brand new with Tiger, which is pretty good for a nearly-six-year-old computer running today's OS. I'm having problems with the Time Machine part, though. Even after ensuring that my username is the same as it was before and making all the permissions my own in both Finder and with chmod, it throws me permissions errors when restoring some, but not all files, with no pattern about it. This isn't a big deal for restoration because I've just used sudo cp to put everything back where I wanted it, but now I have issues with backups. Even though TM sees my old backups and can restore the ones that don't give permissions errors, it still wants to take new backups of things I've manually restored, such as my iTunes folder of about 50GB. That's the big conflict now; I don't want to take up all that space for files that are already backed up. Can anyone offer a fix? Thanks!

coldcaption wrote:
Yes, the other drive was backed up before. If it was previously associated then perhaps something was messed up trying to re-associate.
As long as you pointed it to the backups of that disk, it should be fine.  If not, or if in doubt, just run the command again.
It changes whether or not I have the previously-backed up external drive added to the things to back up (unless it's supposed to do delete the old ones in this case?),
I don't quite follow that.  The Estimated size of full backup is just the total data on the drives that are included (unfortunately, there's no display of them), less any exclusions of files/folders on them.
Finally, though, the size of a backup if I were to take one right now would be 363 GB;
How do you know that?  The only way to tell what Time Machine thinks is new or changed is to actually start a backup, and see what the display ("xxx GB of yyy GB") and/or log messages (". . . xxx MB/GB requested (including padding), yyy MB/GB available.") say.  See #A1 in Time Machine - Troubleshooting for a handy widget to display the log messages.

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