Can't access old backups after reinstalling Lion and restoring with Migration Assistant

Scenario: App Store developed a random, repetitive, failure to update certain apps. After trying two different solutions which only worked for a couple of weeks (including archive uninstall) Apple Support and I decided to go the full hog and do a full Lion reinstall. Did a full final backup with TM and proceded to reinstall from the recovery partition. All went well. I gave my new account the same name as my old original one (and this might be the root of the glitch I will describe). When Lion was working again I used Migration Assistant to recover all the users, applications, and information.
As my new main account and my old one (coming from Mig Assist) had the same name, MigAssist asked if I wanted to merge them. I said "yes". All fine. Everything was apparently there.
Later that day I tried to access my bank and discovered that my 1Password db was an old version. I went to TM to retrieve the one from my pre-reinstall backup. As I had mapped my mac back to the sparsebunddle file in TC it seemed I had access to all my files going back 1.5 years. It showed my oldest backup as Sep 2010 and 700 gb used. All seemed normal.
Unfortunately, the purple bars before the moment of reinstall are all faded and I can't retrieve any information from them. Nothing before that moment is available, not from the Finder or from withing any other application.
My new merged main user appears as "carlos 1" when it should have been just "carlos".
Do you guys have any advice that could help me? Thank you in advance.
My TC is a 1TB 2009 one.

Carlos. wrote:
As my new main account and my old one (coming from Mig Assist) had the same name, MigAssist asked if I wanted to merge them.
No, there is no "merge" option:
You can rename or replace, not merge.
Unfortunately, the purple bars before the moment of reinstall are all faded and I can't retrieve any information from them. Nothing before that moment is available, not from the Finder or from withing any other application.
My new merged main user appears as "carlos 1" when it should have been just "carlos".
You have two separate accounts now.
See Problems after using Migration Assistant for an explanation of what's happened (the blue and pink boxes) and a possible fix in the tan box -- but that won't work if you've done any backups since using Migration Assistant.
If you have done backups, your best bet is to do a full system restore, selecting the last backup from before you did the Migration. See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #14.

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ragob66,
Welcome to the Apple discussions!
Try this:
*Accessing Time Machine Backups From Another User Account or Computer*
Yes, you can do this using the Time Machine interface.
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Control-click the TM icon in the dock and select "Browse Other Time Machine Disks...".
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ragob66,
Welcome to the Apple discussions!
Try this:
*Accessing Time Machine Backups From Another User Account or Computer*
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If I reinstall Lion, and restore my computer from back-up, will it go any faster?

My main issue is not wanting to lose any stuff. Other people use this computer and I can't change it any way apart from speed it up. Are there any other easy/simple techniques to do this?

FaaizKhan wrote:
Are there any other easy/simple techniques to do this?
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Can't access old backups after reinstalling Lion and restoring with Migration Assistant

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