Are you making backups with Apple’s Backup?
I just came over an article written by a fustrated Mac user, that shows how bad Apple’s backup software for Mac-user really is and is another reason for people to not buy Apple’s .Mac subscriptions and trust them your data.
I found that Backup 3.1 would only restore a certain number of the files early in the backup set before it would crash. Any attempt to restore other files from the set resulted only in a crash.
That basically means that you have to find the latest version of your files. Easy if you just have a few MBs of data, but not if you have a GB or more.