Mac OS 10.7: TM Local Backups, Remote Backups, and Versions

I have just tried to “Enter Time Machine” on my wife’s Macbook Pro, and I noticed that in the timeline bar on the right, every backup is represented in purple. According to the Apple’s article linked to above, these are remote backups made to the Time Machine volume (external drive, Time Capsule, or third-party NAS). On the other hand, when I enter “Time Machine” on my Macbook, I see both purple and gray bars on in the backup timeline. The difference between the two laptops is in that I received the following message on my Macbook the other day:

Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you. Click Start New Backup to create a new backup. This will remove your existing backup history. This could take several hours. Click Back Up Later to be reminded tomorrow. Time Machine won’t perform backups during this time.

Therefore, the options one is given are either to proceed or not to proceed, but not proceeding results in the suspension of further Time Machine backups. This message occurred about a month after I installed Mac OS 10.7 (Lion). I believe this message is the result of some sort of consolidation of versions into Time Machine backups. As I mentioned in my previous posts, Mac OS 10.7 does a certain amount of housekeeping on the document versions, and eventually moves some older versions into the Time Machine sparsebundle. I believe that when this attempt is made, the system realizes that the existing Time Machine sparsebundle is not compatible with this feature and basically demands that all existing backups be removed and the sparsebundle be made compatible with the feature that moves versions to the Time Machine backup. Once you agree (and at this point you really have no choice but to agree), you lose all of your previous Time Machine backups, and once the sparsebundle is modified to comply with this new feature, another new feature is automatically enabled as well. This other new feature is local backups. I did not have any local backups made until a few days ago when I got the above message, agreed to Time Machine creating a new backup, and lost all of my previous backups. A day later, I moved the sparsebundle to another location on my ReadyNAS, and then tried to “Enter Time Machine”. To my surprise, I was able to “Enter Time Machine,” but I did not see the Time Machine’s backups made the day before. Then I had Time Machine create a brand new sparsebundle on the ReadyNAS and after my Macbook was backed up to that new sparsebundle, I started noticing a completely new behavior of Time Machine. That was yesterday, and today I started this thread to inform others of the changes to Time Machine functionality and behavior in Mac OS 10.7 and to try and get more information on these features.