Backup issue

[gooser311]

I am not sure where this help request should e filed under, so I put it here.

I have been running 10.3 on my laptop ever since I got it two years ago. Yesterday I decided to put 10.4 on it since my family licenses aren't all being used. So I backed up my whole drive onto my external firewire drive. After the backup finished I checked the final file size of the backup and it matched.

Next I re-formatted and installed 10.4 on my system. Now I am trying to go back and copy my old user directory back to my computer and I cannot see it. If I view the directory info of the "Users" directory it reads the correct size, I just can't see anything.

Next I tried to view it in terminal and I still can't view it.

Any ideas? I think I had file vault enabled on my previous installation.

Thanks in advance.

[gooser311]

I think I have figured out my own problem. Please read.

I don't know if this is right, but here is what I have done to view the files. In the terminal I entered in the following command:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

Once that is entered you can see the .username file where username is the username that that specific user account had. Inside that you see username.spareimage. You open that and enter the user password and shabam! you have yoru old user directory mounted.

Thanks for the help . Hope this helps someone else at least.