Restoring iPhone 3GS

I recently lost all of my settings and other recent changes on my iphone 3GS after my iphone crashed during my latest update. iTunes locked me out for a while and finally when my phone was able to connect to iTunes again it forced me to do a restore to factory settings because it had no record of any of my previous syncings.

My phone works fine now, but it is just frustrating that all of the little changes are gone. I use time machine occasionally to backup my system. So I found a file on my time machine with a Mobilesync backup from about a month ago. I would much rather have lost a month instead of 2 years. But when I open the mobilesync file it is just a ton of random files that are composed of letters and numbers. I think these are what I need, but I don't know how to get them back on my phone. Any ideas?

Thanks for any help I can get