Operating Time Machine over a remote Back to My Mac connection is a challenge -- can I do restores in Terminal?

Question

When operating Time Machine remotely via Back to My Mac (and by remotely, I mean from Illinois to Ohio ), seeing your remote mouse cursor is largely a no-go, even in Lion. It simply does not get displayed, with very minor, flickering exceptions.  Certainly it becomes impossible to operate the Time Machine's Finder window in any mouse-clicking way.  I can barely operate the CANCEL or RESTORE buttons, and that's if I help myself by mousing over from outside the Screen Sharing Window, and kind of estimating if I am over the button area.  Similarly, I can get the mouse to give me some approximate date in the backups progression.  But the way to select a file, I found, is through arrow-keys.  I can get to the right directory before starting the Time Machine, and I can navigate to the correct file with much delay using the arrow-keys.  In short, it's a major freaking pain, because of all the lag and invisible mouse. 
But I was able to do what I needed, given enough pain and perseverance.
Question:  Given the impoverished visuals for mouse operations, is there a way to do this on the command line, not through the moving galaxy syntactic sugar that just gets in the way?  Can I run the whole restore operation in Terminal?  Of course, still via Back to My Mac, because I don't know how to get to the remote iMac in any other way remotely, given that it sits behind a cable modem and a Time Capsule router with NAT.  And I don't want to set up port forwarding, if I don't have to.
Thanks for reading, and I'll take your considered expert advice.
-- Marek

Answer 1

Well, I have now reformatted/partitioned my poor WD Elements 2TB drive about a dozen times as well as restarted my 1TB Time Capsule so many times it's no wonder it's as confused as I am! <G>
Last night, at your suggestion, William, and in respect for your continued support, I tried creating two 1TB Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partitions on the WD external USB drive, both with GUID partition tables. Both volumes mounted to my laptop's desktop flawlessly and without issue.
Once the external drive was connected to the Time Capsule, however, it was a crap shoot as to whether or not the drive was recognized at all, reporting a problem with the disk, or, even at one point, mounting one of the two volumes but not both. <sigh>
I read somewhere on the Internet that you need to restart the Time Capsule for volumes on an external USB drive to be recognized.
So I tried that. I connected the freshly partitioned/formatted disk to the Time Capsule and restarted it. This succeed in removing the issue of reporting a nameless drive with a capacity of 0MB. It then reported the drive with its correct name but would not recognize whatever volumes in whatever partitions that particular crack at it contained with the exception of the once, as I mentioned above, when only one of two volumes mounted correctly and was listed with the right name and capacity on the Time Capusule's Setup's Disk tab.
At this point I have given up on my goal to use the external drive with Time Machine to back up my Macs or to hope I will ever be able to see its contents remotely via Back to My Mac. All I would like to do now is simply find a reason why I can't get it successfully connected and playing nice with my Time Capsule in the first place!
Any further suggestions or advice as to what steps I might take next would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you all.