Time Machine Backup Missing?

Question

I have been searching for lost photos for a couple of years, and have a new MBP and want to try to finally reaarange my digital life. I had stopped time machine from making backups because I was hoping I would not overwrite the backups that may have contained the missing photos, since time machine as it marches along eventually overwrites older backups to make room for newer ones.
So this issues has two main parts. First, I have all the missing "phtos" in its own iphoto library. Thus I can see about 900 or so thumbnails, but of course no photos to go with the thumbnails. I had hoped I could at least recover the thumbnails, but when I look in all my drives I don't see a folder associated with the thumbs - only partial thumbs that appear to be from face recognition attempts.
My next goal was to try to restore a backup from the time machine to the brand new MBP in the hopes that the photos may be in the backup. When I navigate to my time capsule, I can see saprsebundles there, but when I try to restore from time machine several I can't select which point in time to back up from. When I look at my time machine preferences on my current mchine (running 10.6.8), it shows latest backups failed, but not because it was turned off but because it says it doesn't recognize the username or password. I have updated the firmeware, and when I go into the time capsule through airport utility it shows everything operating fine, and I can access time capsule with no problem. When I click on time machine it says no backup can be found and asks if I want to setup time capsule. Now I'm stuck because I certainly don't want to accidentally erase any backups that may exist.
So how do I get to these time machine backups to see if indeed the lost photos are lurking anywhere? And can these thumbs somehow be found so I can at least save them? I know they won't be of much quality but at least I can see something when viewing them in iphoto.

Answer 1

Not sure why you say "at least three" unless the Time Capsule is set up to Secure shared disks with accounts (per the Disks window of Airport Utility).  In that case, there may be multiple accounts on the TC; each one must log on with its name and password, and will see only what belongs to that particular account:
If you backed-up with one account for a while, then changed to another, each would have a sparse bundle for the same Mac.
Othewise, there should be one sparse bundle per Mac.
Should be only one sparsebundle, but I probably copied things in the past - this is almost 3 years that I'm still coming back and hoping to find these photos on a backup somehow. When I open Airport Utility I don't even see a menu bar like your image shows, and when I go to the menu itself all options including disk are greyed out.
Here is my finder window with the sparsebundles:
they all seem to have the same data in them.
They'll all have the same folder structure, but the contents should be the same as the Mac that made them.
But if the backups are made at different times you would think the files would be different. If I have photos taken every month, shouldn't the backups from say February have additional files than the backups from January?
The big question is are there some earlier backups lurking somewhere - I thought I had read that TM keeps earlier backups even though it may not display them.
If you don't see them via the Finder, either there's nothing else there, or there's some sort of corruption or damage. 
So essentially it would seem that any backups from 2009 are gone if the earliest backup from the sparsebundle is dated 2010?
Since I see these backups through finder, would the display other tm backups display something different if I could get it to work?
Nothing extra, unless there's damage that can be fixed.
The sparsebundles seem to mount and open through finder, but nothing works through tm itself.
Have you tried the things in my previous post?
The things in the previous post seemed to apply if I couldn't mount a sparsebundle - I must be missing what to do when TM itself will not start from the dock or menu bar. I did reselect it as drive option and then turned off backups again.