Home folder does not appear when trying to restore it from a backup

Question

Hello Macintosh community, I hope you can shed some light on this very strange behavior I am experiencing when trying to recover a User's home directory from a Backup archive.
Recently, my MacBook internal hard disk stopped working (hardware failure of the disk itself, it does not spin any more). I had been making regular backups of the entire internal disk to an external hard disk.
I went to an Apple reseller and had them put in a new internal hard drive, and also purchased MacOS 10.5, which was installed on this internal drive.
I then installed Backup 3 onto this 10.5 system, and mounted the external drive with the backup to restore the contents of my home directory.
However, when opening the Backup application and trying to restore, it shows the entire contents of the hard disk to be restored, EXCEPT my home directory. Home directories of other users are visible, just not mine. So, Backup is effectively not able to restore my home directory.
In an attempt to restore other information, I decided to try to restore the entire contents of the backup to another location, and then manually retrieve any other files I needed from that restored backup.
During that restore, I thought I'd open a terminal window, and take a look at the /Volumes directory. In this directory, I noticed a volume named after the Backup Plan I was restoring from. This volume was not visible in the Finder, just in the /Volumes directory visible in Terminal.
Curious, I opened the Users folder of that backup volume, and to my surprise I found my home directory with its contents! So, from Terminal, I did a recursive copy from the 'missing' (in the Backup application) home directory to my internal disk, and lo and behold, it contained the data from my home directory!
So, I am thinking that my home directory exists in the backup, but that the Backup application is somehow not showing it.
The directory structure I copied using Terminal only contains the contents of my home directory the way it was when I created my initial full backup, and thus it does not contain any subsequent modifications, stored in the 1.5 years worth of incremental backups I created later. I guess I could manually go through all incremental backups, extract the home directories from each of them, and manually combine them into a single one, representing the final home directory before my disk failed, but that is the Backup application's job.
My question to the forum:
- Have any of you experienced a similar problem, and if so, were you able to recover the 'hidden' directory from the backup files, and how?
- Maybe the Backup development team at Apple can provide some suggestions for how to retrieve my home directory from the backup files I have.
Obviously, it's important for me to get my files back. I did make backups on a regular basis, so I thought I did the right thing. It's especially frustrating, since I'm pretty sure the backup files contain the home directory, but I just can't get at it!
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
JK
Software versions of system before crash:
- System version: 10.4 Tiger (up to date with the latest updates)
- Backup version 3 (kept up to date with the latest updates)
Software versions of system after crash:
- System version: 10.5 Leopard (up to date with the latest updates)
- Backup version 3 (version as of the day of this posting)

Answer 1

The original install had 3 regular users, and I'm also seeing the "Shared" user when looking at the volume via Terminal. On my new disk, I created a user (with admin rights) with the same name as one of the users on the back up. When I log in as this user and then start Backup again, the home directory of that user is visible in Backup. However, the home directory I want is still hidden.
On a side note: I'm wondering whether these full or incremental backups are somehow similar to .dmg files, since they seem to appear in the /Volumes list while Backup is restoring from a backup file.
What I am doing right now, is to have Backup do a complete restore. But as soon as I started Backup, I opened a terminal window,did a cd (change directory) to the backup file (which appears as a volume). Then I copied the contents I of the home directory I want (via cp -R <home-directory-name> <destination>) to another hard disk.
Interestingly enough, I noticed that Backup, while it was doing the restore, opened a dialog indicating that it could not close the backup file because it was in use by me having a Terminal window open in one of its directories. As soon as I closed the terminal window, and allowed Backup to re-try, it successfully continued, opening the next backup file in succession.
As soon as it continued, I cd-ed into the home directory of that next backup file, and copied the contents of the home directory from it. So, I'm doing this for the home directory in question for all backup files. I assume that this gets me as many copies (versions) of the home directory as there are backup files.
The next thing I need to to after all backup files have been processed, is to manually try to consolidate all the extracted home directory versions into a single one. Yes, this sounds insane, and it is, but until I know of another way to solve this problem, it's the only thing I can do
What a fantastic way to spend a weekend!