Time Machine FAIL (again)

Question

I don't have a question here: just want to share my experience, because I don't have a blog and writing is more therapeutic than banging my head against a wall.
Yesterday, I need to use MS Excel to work on some spreadsheets in order to do my taxes.  If course, my version of MS doesn't work with Lion, but I think I'm so smart because I have a backup startup drive, which runs 10.5.  So I restart in Leopard, and before I even open my documents I see the Time Machine clock start to turn.  Whoops--I don't want to up this old OS!  What if it interferes with the main Lion Time Machine?  I go to stop it as quickly as I can, but I still see the Horizontal Barbershop Pole spinning for a while.  Finally it gives me the error message "Time Machine cannot complete backup. 1.27 TB required, 90 GB available" (or something to that effect--I didn't write it down).  I go back to Excel, finish my work, and keep my fingers crossed that this little hiccup didn't corrupt my system.
Next morning, I spin up the computer (using Lion).  On schedule, Time Machine starts its work...only it doesn't get too far.  I get the same message I saw earlier about "1.27 TB required, 90 GB available."  Great--it's trying to create a whole new backup.  So, I come to these forums and start poking around for help, start drafting up a question, then go back to TM Prefs and notice that it says the last backup is from yesterday at 4 pm.  That's just before I restarted in 10.5 and this whole issue began.  So I figure I'll just go into Time Machine and restore from that point and we should all be good....right?
Unfortunately, when I open Time Machine, all I see is "Now."  No way to go further back in time because there's nothing there.  Now, this is puzzling....maybe when I went to 10.5, for some reason Time Machine lost its reference to the sparsebundle.  I go back to Prefs, check the selected disk, and that seems right....still showing 90 GB of 2 TB available.  I go to the Finder, open the Time Capsule, and find three .sparsebundles: one for my MacBook Pro, which looks intact (360 GB in size); one that was created yesterday at 5 PM, which totals 460 MB (presumably that was created when 10.5 attempted to create a new backup); and one that was last modified yesterday at 4, which is....3.6 GB?  Hold on, let's do some math:
360 GB + 3.6 GB + (406 MB = 0.406 GB) = 364.006 GB visible in Finder
2 TB = 2000 GB
If 90 GB available, then 2000 GB - 90 = 1910 GB used, according to TM Prefs
What happened to 1.546 TB of backup data?
As I sit and ponder whether I'm losing my mind, or if my math is actually better than my computer's (which is actually the most comforting thought of the day), the TM icon starts spinning again.  I'm fully expecting the same "not enough space" message...but instead, it starts backing up.  Only, it's doing a full backup: right now, the progress meter reads "91.07 GB of 1.27 TB - About a day."  No going back now--several months of history, now Gone.
(You may be asking yourself: your progress meter is already at 91 GB?  Wow, your Time Machine backs up fast!  Not really--I'd just gotten about this far in this post when Safari crashed.  Granted, I had a bunch of other windows open--because I still have to, y'know, work--including a bunch of sites that are heavy with HTML5 animations and whatnot.  Safari opened back up with all those same windows open--yay Lion!--only, the window into which I'd been typing this post was back at the login screen--boo Lion.)
Anyway--now, I'm awaiting the Time Machine Backup and keeping my fingers crossed that I don't have to go back and retrieve any old files.  (Note to self--never rely on Time Machine as a versioning tool.)  In the Finder, I'm looking at those .sparsebundles again, and something odd is going on: there are still the same three .sparsebundles: "My MacBook Pro," "My Computer," and "My Computer (2)_0017f2092828."  "My Computer.sparsebundle" is the one that was listed at 3.6 GB before the full backup began; now it's listed at 1.49 TB.  It still claims to be last modified at 4 PM yesterday.  "My Computer (2)_0017f2092828.sparsebundle" is still 406 MB, but it was last modified....one minute ago.  From this, I'd infer that the 1.27 TB Time Machine Backup is somehow affecting the smaller file....but its size isn't increasing.  Presumably, it's actually writing into the larger file, but why the modification date isn't changing is a mystery.  No sense worrying about this right now....
If you're still reading and still interested, I still need to rant.  This whole thing began so innocently.  I resisted upgrading to Lion because I'd heard (read) the griping and I was pretty happy with Snow Leopard anyway.  But about 7 weeks ago (when I was still on SL), I decided I'd put together a calendar for my wife for her birthday.  I fire up iPhoto, put together this beautiful calendar filled with pictures of us and the kids, and click "order."  Only I'm notified that I can't order the calendar from this version of iPhoto--I need to upgrade.  (What?  Why would you put the order button there--why have a Calendar feature at all--if you can't order it?)  I can't even export the calendar I spent so much time creating (my first thought, because I've put together calendars on my MacBook before).  So I visit the App Store.  I can plunk down $15 to upgrade to the latest version of iPhoto, or for just $15 more I can upgrade to Lion.
Now, I don't enter into this lightly.  Lion has been out for something like 7 months and I've held out till now.  But I figure by now, they've probably figured out most of the bugs, and besides I'm in the tech industry so it helps to get familiar with the newest and coolest.  OK, let's do this thing....
The problems began almost right away.
That calendar I ordered that started this whole thing?  Saved the comments and photos in the new and "improved" iPhoto, but didn't save the formatting.  When it arrived, there were several pictures in which heads were cut off because the default cropping was applied.
What happened to the month column in iCal?  Why would anybody want to get rid of it?
Microsoft doesn't work, of course.  I didn't think this would bug me, but I miss it.  And several other apps don't work either...Adobe CS3, among others.  Should I downgrade back to Snow Leopard?  Maybe.  But wait, there's more....
Two weeks after the upgrade, just when I'm seriously considering downgrading, I get this message: "Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you." Like a good little monkey, I come to these forums to figure out what this means and how to get my backups working again...only to find that, well, TM is screwed.  I could browse and retrieve data from existing backups, but couldn't make any new ones.  According to Pondini and anybody else who's gone through this, I would have to erase all existing backups and start from scratch.  So I went ahead and chose "Start New Backup," and after about three days of maddening errors (".sparsebundles" turned into ".purgeables"....progress bars that never made any progress....complete system freeze, requiring manual restart...) I finally have a new Time Machine backup in place.
Now, I want to downgrade to Snow Leopard more than ever.  But my previous system has disappeared from Time Machine (not once but twice!), and all the posts I've read about downgrading without TM seem to require wiping the drive clean and installing fresh.  I'm fortunate that I have most of my data on a separate drive from the system, but I'm nervous about making the change: I'm doubtful that everything will go back to the way it was, especially the stuff that I've done in Lion (and iCal, iTunes, iPhoto) over the last couple months.
Either way, the upgrade to Lion has been an incredible waste of time and energy.  My first computer was an Apple IIGS in 1987.  I've been using Macs ever since, even against the advice of friends who thought the company was collapsing in the late 90's.  I think I used Jaguar for two years withou so much as an application crash.  But I'm so much more frustrated with Apple now than I've ever been before.  Think I'll go take another look at Linux before I climb back onboard with another OS "upgrade."
Cheers, may the force, &c.,
tw

Answer 1

Only a quick note to tell you that I too am frustrated with my Mac expereince after being a user since the mid-90's. I bought a new Air and had enough issue with it that I gave in an bought a Pro and will be selling myA Air. It's better for me, but I gotta tell you...still having all sorts of problems - most all stemming from Time Machine. Gaaah! Best of luck!