Thanks, Jim.
Since my cluster of computers have been through several iterations of operating system re-installs, which means that many of the files have changed as well, I will try restoring the backups before deleting them...
What really threw my nice organized home network off was a combination of two problems occurring around the same time... A new Dell notebook that I bought with Vista required an OS re-install on 2 different occasions with a loss of all of the files the first time (unexpected), and then the hard drive on my older XP Pro desktop failed (but was mostly backed up and in preparations for being upgraded). I had planned to try to clone the old hard drive to a larger, newer drive, but it failed just before I got around to it.
If somebody sold some sort of "backup wizard" which I could use to just throw all of my old backup sets onto one, big Terabyte drive, and it would sort through them, it would be great!
bbneo