How do I access time machine from different user account

Hi there.
Last week I had to take my comupter into the local Apple Store because I was having problems with Boot Camp.  The genius at the store had to delete everything from my hard drive and reinstall it from my external hard drive.  As part of the process she created a "Apple" user account.  I now want to restore some files (unrelated to this Boot Camp story) from my time machine archive.  However, all the files prior to this Apple Store encounter are red -- and it says I do not have permission to view them.  When I click "get info" it says that the "Apple" account has the read/write access to them and the option to unlock them is greyed out.  How can I get these files from the archive and get them onto my main user account where they belong?  The "Apple" account does not have a password so I think I can easily log on as that account, but I don't know where to go from there.
PS The files in question are iTunes libraries.
Thanks for your help.

Ok, I fixed it.  Here's what I did.
I logged into my computer under the Apple account.  Then I went into Time Machine.  I found my old files under Users-->"my main account".  I was able to restore those files to Users-->Shared.  Then I was able to log back into "my main account" and retrieve the files from the shared folder.  It worked!  Hope this helps someone else some time!

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    Message was edited by: Rant&Raver
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    Shadow99999 wrote:
    Hi,
    My 2TB backup drive recently became full, and I became curious as to what was filling it up. I wrote a perl script to analyze the Time Machine backups,
    No need to write your own script for that. there are a couple of already made nice GUI tools for this - TimeTracker http://www.charlessoft.com/ and BackupLoupe http://soma-zone.com/BackupLoupe/
    and I noticed that over 50% of my backup was filled with AP.Thumbnails and AP.Minis from the Aperture project directory. In particular, the AP.Thumbnails files in the backup consumed 737 GB of disk space!
    The problem with the thumbnails files is that they are a single file that contains all of the thumbnails for all of the 40,000 photos I have in Aperture and it is now 20gb in size. Every time I add a new file to Aperture, the thumbnail file changes, and I get a new 20gb of data added to my backup. I add photos often which means that most of my backups have 20gb of Aperture files (which are easy to rebuild and don't need to be backed up).
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    I tried to tell Time Machine to exclude the files via the GUI, but Time Machine sees the Aperture Library as a single package and won't let me exclude individual files from within the package.
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    I googled around, and found the attribute that Time Machine puts on files to exclude them from the backup. I used xattr to set the attributes:
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    I was not aware of this method for excluding stuff from TM backups. could you provide a link to where you found this?
    I also used this command on the iPhoto thumbnail files.
    I used spotlight to find all of the files with this attribute using this command:
    sudo mdfind "comapple_backupexcludeItem = 'com.apple.backupd'"
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    that's because Spotlight never looks inside packages unless you start a search inside a package directly. iphoto seems to be the only exception. I don't know how it's done.

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    Andrew Saks wrote:
    Hi all -
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    I'm not sure of the precise point (TM need some free space on the backup drive to operate) but yes, this will eventually happen. when it does, TM will inform you of this and will give you an option of either stopping TM backups and changing the TM drive or starting to delete old backups. If you choose the latter it will start deleting old backups to create space for new ones. this is done automatically.
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    not unless you partition the drive.
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    it's an option but not right now. you have too little free space left for a successful partitioning process. If you try, the process is sure to fail due to disk fragmentation.
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    don't. besides TM there are much better options out there. CCCloner and Superduper! are better than anything that OWC software has to offer.
    It would be mighty ironic if the software I use to save all my data got so fat, it sacrificed all my data....
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