How do i see my desktop and applications after a time machine restore?

Question

What a disaster.   For reasons I won't bore anyone with, I had to end up reformatting my iMac hard drive (internal drive, I7) to get my machine working again.  I have had a daily backup going (thank goodness) with my Drobo NAS drive using Time Machine.  Yes, I know Apple doesn't technically support network drives with Time Machine, but anyone with a Drobo (and Data Robotics) will tell you it works great.   That's NOT the issue.
I flattened (reformatted) my machine and reinstalled Snow Leopard.  I then connected to my Drobo drive with Time Machine, and searched the most recent backups and had it restore THE ENTIRE MACHINE.  All applications, all documents, etc.  Took about 14 hours.
I also created the same account (I think!) that I used before when I installed Snow Leopard.    However, when I reboot, my desktop looks like a fresh Snow Leopard desktop, and none of my applications or documents show anywhere.  Yet, I am sure they are there, because when I went to later restore one file (Photoshop CS5), it said "this file already exists, do you want to copy over it?"  I chose not to.
I feel like it must be some permissions or account thing, but for the life of me, i can't figure out where I went wrong.   It would be a HUGE inconvenience for me to truck this huge machine (and my network backup drive) into an Apple store to talk to one of their experts, so I'm hoping I can get this resolved here with your help.
Basically, I'm stumped.  Anyone got any ideas?
thanks
dc

Answer 1

From your description, it sounds like you may have more serious issues than a simple permissions problemand that you are now dealing with a dysfunctional "Frankensystem." Nevertheless, it is usually worthwhile trying something relatively fast and simple before going on to more complicated solutions.
You have not indicated what remedies you may have already tried outside of the setup Assistant Tip, so I am assuming you have not yet tried anything.
I have never faced this precise problem before, but in other situations involving permissions issues, I have often had success doing the following:
1) Do a "Get Info" on the folder(s) with which you are experiencing issues. In your case, this is pretty well your entire restored drive, since the Applications folder exists at the root level. So go ahead and do a "Get Info" on your internal hard drive.
2) Click on the padlock icon in the lower right corner of the GI window and enter your admin password when prompted.
3) At the bottom of the window in the Sharing and Permissions section, ensure that your disk is set up this way:
system=Read & Write
admin=Read & Write
everyone=Read only
4) Click on the gear icon and choose "Apply to enclosed items" from the pull-down menu. Allow this to work through, which in the case of a whole drive may take some time.
5) Reboot the machine and log back into your home account. Hopefully, you can now see and access all the files that should be there.
If this doesn't work, your problem may lie in the fact that upon your reinstall of Snow Leopard, you created a home folder with the same name as the one you are trying to restore from your backup, thereby creating a big headache. You might have to repeat the entire reinstall/restore process, but this time creating an account with an entirely different name when you install Snow Leopard, and then deleting it after the restore from backup.
OR
If the total amount of data contained on your Drobo Time Machine backup is not yet prohibitively huge, I would suggest that the easiest and most foolproof solution might be to use a program such as SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the drive to a partition on a storage device of sufficient size directly attached to your iMac. You could then reformat your internal drive and repeat the complete restore process from the Snow Leopard install disk which should then yield normal results, i.e. a fully functional home account in which everything works as usual upon login.
This will eat up considerable time, but most significantly, it is machine time, not your time!
In my experience, the entire Time Machine process is a finely tuned one that does not take kindly to tinkering under the hood or straying from the blessed path, as you have just discovered.