Problems with a clean restore

Question

I have an iMac at my office that is about a 2007 machine.  For the first time this spring, I began to have some real problems with it around March or April; the details of those problems aren't important here.  The tech support guy at my university finally decided that the best option was probably a complete wipe of the hard drive and then a systematic restore that wasn't completely Time Machine based.  The reason for this was because we were afraid there might be something in the settings and things in other places that might perpetuate the problems.  I put all of my data in Dropbox (I don't use iCloud yet but will soon) but left things like my music in Time Machine and also created a folder on the external drive for all of the items on my Desktop.  The tech wiped the drive, reinstalled Mountain Lion and iLife and I then began to slowly put the apps back on the drive that I wanted.  So far, all is going very well and virtually all of the problems have gone away.
There is one hitch, though.  When I fired up Time Machine to bring back all of my music for iTunes, I couldn't see any of my old backups.  It's as though they don't exist.  I went to the external drive in Finder and saw both my backups as well as the folder with my desktop items.  However--when I try to either look at the backups or open a file/folder in my saved Desktop folder, I get a message saying that I don't have permission to view any of this.  I looked at the users folder in the backup and the user name in the backup is different from the user name that currently on my machine (which, I'm sure, is because that's the way the tech set it up).  It's a real pain, because even the folder I made with the Desktop items won't let me open--unless I go in, one at a time, and change permissions to read and write.
Is there some type of workaround on this with administrative permissions or something like this--especially for the Time Machine data?  I would like to do this without spending untold hours on it.
Thanks,
Warren

Answer 1

warrenfromfargo wrote:
However--when I try to either look at the backups or open a file/folder in my saved Desktop folder, I get a message saying that I don't have permission to view any of this.
That's because the user account isn't recognized as being the same one as on the backups.  It's not the name, it's the mostly-hidden UserID number or UID.  The cause is a bit different, but the result is the same as explained in the pink box in Problems after using Migration Assistant.
(The procedure in #B6 of the link in the other post doesn't apply here; that's for a new computer or HD, or when TM thinks you got a new one.)
What you might be able to do is, log on to a different account (if there isn't one, create one via System Prefs > Users & Groups).  See if that user has permission to the backups.  If so, restore the data you want, to an alternate location, such as the special Shared user folder in the top-level Users folder.  See Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #16 if you don't know how to do that. If not, create another and try that one.
Then log on to the account you want to have the data, and copy from the Shared folder to that home folder.   That will get the permissions right.