I beat mass effect 2 some time ago and like patrick i'd like to play through the dlc before ME3 comes out but i'm a little confused how you do that. I'm playing the 360 version and i'd like to use a post game save if there is such a thing. I have three save files that i can load, one that says restart mission collector station, one is an autosave that has the most hours on it but looks like it has some missions still available that i know i've done when i first played through it, and another save that has around the same hours as the restart mission file. I don't want to have to replay the final mission in order for any of the character changes that might happen to go through to ME3. Any help i can get would be appreciated guys

I would load up the autosave and convert it to a hard save, then check each of the three files individually for mission completion. The game autosaves after you beat it so that's probably what you want to be going with. The series of actions it would take to create another autosave with more hours played and fewer missions completed are kind of ridiculous.

there is such a thing as a post game save. the game never abruptly comes to an end.

possible you never saved after you did the final mission, and you could have overwrote the autosave by fooling around in another save state.

After redoing the collector mission to save a few people (with the right information on who to use for keeping them alive), the collector end mission might take about 30-60 min at the most but it goes by rather quick. Once everyone was saved I ran through the firewalker mission real quick but that's what I'd say to use since if anyone has all the ship upgrades in ME2 to just run through the collector mission quick to send that character through the ME3 game with that version of Shepard.