Time Machine just deleted ± 100GB of files (unrecoverable)

Hi,

When the following happened, it took me by surprise abit.

After giving it some thought, i'm not sure what to think of it anymore.

Please help me get the (mental) image clear. The situation is as follows:

After making an horrendous mistake, the one you'd make once every several years,

my system became completely un-bootable. I'll spare you the details, but i knew that

it technically was not that bad, and should be relatively easy to fix by going back to

my last Time Machine back-up, which was less than a day old.

So all i would loose was stuff from the last half a day.. i though.

Since the system was unbootable, i booted from the 10.6-dvd, where i choose the

"Restore System From Backup" option in the installer.

Restoring went fine, the machine is running great again (just like it was last night)...

But then i discovered that 4 of the 9 directories i EXCLUDED from being backed-up

in Time Machines preferences were completely empty. All contents are deleted.

The folders in question are ~/Music , ~/Movies, ~/Downloads and one in Documents

containing several diskimages of (vmware) virtual machines. ± 100Gb in total.

The odd thing, is that the other excluded directories haven't been touched, everything

is stil there.

Now, at the one hand, it's not super strange that this data was deleted, if you'd consider

a 'restore' a total 1:1 clone of a backup to the harddisk. Including folders that were empty

at the time i excluded these folders from the backup.

At the other hand: they were excluded, so why would TimeMachine have to touch them?

And why were not all folders affected?

The fact that this data is gone is not a huge problem, after all, i didn't back it up anyway.

My main music and movies libraries live on another (external) harddrive, the VMs are just

a little inconvenient to have to setup again etc..

But it really surprised me that it happened, and went against my logical understanding of how

TimeMachine works.. Am i thinking wrong?

thanks