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Does a full time machine restore install a fresh copy of OS X?

rockstarjoe

rockstarjoe

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
I have time machine set to back-up everything on my system. Recently I've had some weird quirks on my system so I thought perhaps it might be time to do a fresh install of Leopard (I had previously upgraded from Tiger).

Anyway when I loaded up my Leopard install disc I noticed that there is an option in the installer menu to do a full time machine backup. Just out of curiousity I tried this option, and 2.5 hours later my system had been reinstalled to the hard drive.

My account was intact and everything looked pretty much exactly the same. I noticed that when I opened mail it had to import my mail all over again, though, and when I tried to play DRM files in iTunes I had to use another authorization.

So my question is, did this Time Machine Restore actually re-install the core OS and then import my account and settings from time machine, or did it actually take all of my old system files and copy them back to the hard drive?

Thanks for anyone who can shed some light on this.

Joe
 
Earlier this year I upgraded my disk, and used Time Machine as an intermediate back-up.

Brilliantly, imo, I got to choose whether I wanted a full restore from the back-up, or wanted to do a fresh install of Leopard, and a restore of the accounts and data. I chose the latter, as the previous installation was an upgrade from Tiger, and a fresh start seemed like a good idea. I needed my Leopard disk to re-install - so I guess you'll know whether you did that.

Anyway, your mail must have lost the last timestamp of the last pop3 sync, so re-imported the mail still on the server, I guess. No biggie, and nothing to worry about.

I also had to reauthorise my iTunes Music Store puchases - I assume this was because the disk ID (the unique ID for each drive) had changed, and disk ID is used in licensing, I believe. As I hadn't thought to deauthorise the music in advance, I had to contact Apple for support. Apple were very responsive in deauthorising all my music so I could re-authorise on my fresh installation - great job there Apple.

I suggest you get them to de-authorise it all, so you don't have one of your DRM 'counts' allocated to your old drive.

If you didn't change your drive, some or none of the above may apply 😉
 
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