Apple's website was not much help for me, and I was thinking I was going to have to say goodbye to my iPhoto library and my music. I then thought that the file (with the extension .incrementalbackup) was probably a replacement for some type of archive. I know that Unix'ish things like to use gz or tar.gz and so I made a guess: I renamed my file to TAR.GZ, and it then looked like a folder.
I opened the folder and browsed around until I found a file called backup.sparseimage, which looked just like a DMG icon. I opened that file, and it mounted like any other DMG file, and I was able to pull out most of my files. I had made an incremental backup, so not everything was there, but almost all of it was.
Hope this helps some one else.

