Restoring and backing up again to Time Machine

Question

Hi Apple Community,
I recently had to replace the hard drive on my iMac. After the repair, I connected my Mac to my Time Capsule backup and did a complete resotre of my hard drive (approximatley 500 GB). The whole process took about 8 hours but when I was done I had successfully transfered over all my files, applications, preferences, and settings and was satisfied. However, when I attempted tp perform my next Time Machine backup, my computer began a new initial backup of my entire 500 GB of data. I couldn't understand why I would need to do a complete, fresh backup when I had just finished a complete restore. I called Apple and spoke to a Time Machine/Time Capsule Specialist who agreed that my computer was acting strangely and transferred me to an Apple Senior Advisor who would "have access to better tools for resolving my issue." The Senior Advisor told me that my Time Machine was actually behaving properly since backups are associated with unique hard drive adresses not content/settings, so a new hard drive will always require a new full backup. I was extremely frustrated with this response and felt like I recieved the infamous "it's not a bug; it's a feature" excuse.
Does anyone know if the Senior Advisor is correct? If so, it seams like a major flaw with the Time Machine software and means I have to spend another 8 hours backing up my system. Additionaly, the Advisor mentioned that the new backup will create a new sparsbundle file (though I can't currently see it since the backup is still in progress) meaning I will have to delete my legacy backups to save space. If the Advisor was wrong does anyone know of a workaround? 
I've actually done several Time Machine Restores before including from an old MacBook Pro to a new one which would cause a similar situation. I can't remember ever having to do a complete fresh backup, but I may have simply forgotten. What I can't understand (but forgot to mention to the Apple Advisor) is that my Time Machine System Preferences show the previous dates for the "Oldest" and "Latest" backups. If Time Machine were truly tied to my hard drive why would System Preferences believe my iMac had already backed up?
Thanks in advance for any help or assitance,
Jonathan

Answer 1

jfudem wrote:
The Senior Advisor told me that my Time Machine was actually behaving properly since backups are associated with unique hard drive adresses not content/settings
That's correct, but incomplete.  The full restore (and Setup Assistant and Migration Assistant) were changed effective with Snow Leopard to leave a "trail" in the SystemMigration.log so Time Machine could figure out what happened, and "associate" the new drive with the old backups, and only do an incremental backup.
That often didn't work in Snow Leopard, unfortunately, and was improved in Lion, where it seems to work much more often, but (obviously) not always.
Also effective with Lion is a new UNIX command that allows you to do this manually, but unfortunately it doesn't work if your backups are on a network, for some reason.
What I can't understand (but forgot to mention to the Apple Advisor) is that my Time Machine System Preferences show the previous dates for the "Oldest" and "Latest" backups. If Time Machine were truly tied to my hard drive why would System Preferences believe my iMac had already backed up?
It's not your Mac, but your internal HD that appears to be new.  If you restart the backup, once it finishes, you'll still have the old backups, but as if they were on a HD that's no longer connected to your Mac.  You'll need the procedure in #E3 of Time Machine - Troubleshooting to see or restore from them.