I want to do a clean install of OS X on my iBook 800. Besides copying my home directory to another computer, do I have to do anything else so that I'll be able to restore everything under a new username on the new installation of OS X? Manual suggestions please. I don't want to shell out any money for .Mac or a backup program. Thanks.
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Clean Install
- Thread starter bcharm
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All you have to do is copy your library folder and your home folder, that should be all you need, it is better to do a clean install of apps anyway.
You don't need to even copy your home folder. Unless you plan on formatting the drive.
When you do a fresh install of OSX (not formatting) it will put the old system and users folders in a folder labeled 'previous system'. You won't lose anything. From that folder you can copy over whatever you want manually.
When you do a fresh install of OSX (not formatting) it will put the old system and users folders in a folder labeled 'previous system'. You won't lose anything. From that folder you can copy over whatever you want manually.
I don't recommend copying your system/library folder unless there are very specific files in there that you know you want to keep the preferences for. My reasoning is that you don't want to replace the freshly installed system/library folder with the old one containing possibly damager files and/or updated files that will not work properly with your fresh system that hasn't been updated.
Yeah, I was thinking about that yesterday. I don't plan on copying everything back and replacing all the files on the fresh installation, but it's good to have a copy of it just in case there are one or two preference files that I discover I want to put back in.
No that's pretty much it. I guess this is a given but don't forget anything in your user folder like MP3s, Movies, documents. When I plan on formatting I back up every user folder and any shareware app that I may have installed. Pretty much everything else is on install disks so I don't bother wasting my time on duplicating them by backing up the installed app.