(1) I renamed my TC base station with the same name from the previous attempt where I experienced errors. Will this effect my new attempt at backing up with TC and TM? Are there preferences and settings hidden that might make TM think it is backing up on the old TC base station? Should I have used a different name or does this not make a difference?
It won't make any difference.. TM will find no existing backup and will start again.
(2) TM seems to be backing up about 294GB once again and not the 308GB that I am expecting (the size of my HD after restarting the computer). There is a 14GB difference, is this significant? How can I find out what exactly is not being backed up onto TC by TM?
Thanks a lot for your much needed help and input.
I think you are still worrying about nothing.. if you want to do a backup which is more certain, do a disk image. You can do this with superduper, ccc, several other backup packages.. my favourite is clonezilla which uses a linux boot disk, but you might find it difficult to operate.
TM is not a disk clone. It is a file backup.. as such there are temp files which are not backed up.. there are also different ways of measuring files.. due to inefficiency of storage on a hard disk, a large number of small files will take up 20-50% more space than the actual file size.. the hard disk size will reflect used sectors not file bytes.. when a file is backed up, TM breaks it into small segments.. which fully occupy the sectors on the hard disk.. this added efficiency allows the backup to be smaller than the files on the drive.. don't worry it will rapidly get bigger than the hard disk.
Read how TM actually works.
http://pondini.org/TM/Works.html
It is rather different to what you imagine.