Time Machine Backups not showing after reformatting HD on iMac then doing Yosemite Upgrade

[iMore Question]

1. I stopped a Time Machine backup midstream.
2. System totally locked up
3. I had an Apple friend (teaches apple stuff at school & is very knowledgeable)
help me and it was decided only way to get this iMac going again was to reformat and start with a fresh O/S - this was OK because I had Parallels and wanted to get rid of it and go to Boot Camp. (all data was backed and I had alleys to reinstall apps such as Office & Quicken/Quickbooks etc)
4. Reformatted & installed Mavericks
5. Entered Time Machine and no backups were showing - they were obviously hidden there somewhere because it showed I have only 76GB remaining of a 1TB Time Capsule drive - so my backups were hidden
6. Went to Finder and after waiting to load in I was able to see my latest backup. (took a while to show as the spinning wheel spun for about 10 minutes)
7. Copied my latest backup of my documents and iPHOTO Library to my Desktop.
8. Put my documents into the right folder - all seem to be there.
9. PROBLEM - iPHOTO Library is missing MANY of the pictures.
10. Some missing pictures have the Thumbnails and some don't have Thumbnails. Either way when I click on the Thumbnail I get a triangle with an ! mark in the triangle and the original picture is not there.
11. Appears to be many of the pictures that I had edited (Cropped) - but not in all cases. Some were not edited.
12. I have 30K pictures so it is hard to determine just which originals are missing / corrupt
13. I have done the CMD/ALT Open iPhoto & done all the restore iPhoto options. None of these options helped the problem
14. HELP! I have no idea what to do now.

 

[JuJuH2]

Correction: #5 above - 76GB remaining of a 2 TB Time Capsule drive

 

[Godefroy]

Hi! I had a similar situation, here's my story and how I got around it. I started back a couple of months ago researching to upgrade my iMac late 2009 27" i5 to upgrade it with an SSD 3G drive 240GB and by the same means, change the internal drive that was 5 years old. So OWC's on-line Tech team were such an amazing source of information and help during this process, but not the only source! I used different blogs and also a youtube video that saved my life which helps user create a bootable USB key I recommend you look at especially if you don't have hard OS copies with you, just lookup jbtech how to create a bootable os x usb on Youtube. Also, make sure your backup has the same OS version of the the USB key, I suggest making sure your using latest version then do a full backup before proceeding with switch.
My research brought me to invest in a Guardian Maximus RAID firewire enclosure a couple of months ago, again very happy I spent the money on a 2X4TB Raid 1 Back up system. So I proceeded with the hardware change over the week-end and to my surprise when came time to use Time machine fully restore my hard drive, it always failed after 13.1%! I could never get past that number! I spent hours searching and to my grandest surprise I find out hundreds of comments on different blogs stated having issues with Time-Machine restore process. I was starting to loose faith when also Disk migration wasn't helping out because it was failing to recognize the new HDD, only the SSD drive. I told myself, thank god my old internal drive is still functional and that I had a external enclosure available. So I logged on to the on line tech team from my supplier and proceeded the following way: Used time-machine to restore all softwares to the SSD drive. For the rest I am manually copying the balance of the data over in the old drive to the new drive I installed in my iMac, the old drag and drop copy method. I just can't believe how lucky I was and how unreliable time-machine was in this situation. I can't believe it failed the restore procedure and I basically was in trouble if my old drive had crashed.....

You can also try the following steps. Go to Time-Machine and do the following .... which the solution is a massive hack, and definitely something that you’d never stumble into even after spending ages with trial and error

Hit “enter Time Machine”
Press the key combination shift-command-C
Then (very important) select a red bar to go back in time
Explanation: dull red bars represent backups you cannot access, bright red bars you can
Then from Macintosh HD navigate to desired folder you want to restore

Hope this helps you with your issue.