Clean Installs a thing of the past?

[dukebound85]

With the advancement of OS's, are performing a clean install with each OS revision still recommended? Since the implementation of time machine with OSX, it seems that performing a clean install and then recover all your data from TM would be equivalent to merely upgrading.

What are your thoughts? I usually do a clean install but the time it takes to get all my apps working again, as well as my mail, data, etc all in line seems to be more trouble than it's worth.....or is it?

 

[hitekalex]

For major OS releases - I ALWAYS perform a clean install, and then freshly re-install individual apps.. and only the ones I need. As opposed to blindly restoring all the stuff that piled up since the last OS upgrade 1.5-2 years ago.

In my experience - this always results in a faster and more stable system. I view this process as a "yearly spring cleaning" for my computer.

 

[dukebound85]

For major OS releases - I ALWAYS perform a clean install, and then freshly re-install individual apps.. and only the ones I need. As opposed to blindly restoring all the stuff that piled up since the last OS upgrade 1.5-2 years ago.

In my experience - this always results in a faster and more stable system. I view this process as a "yearly spring cleaning" for my computer.

I may go that route for that same reason. One does gather a fair bit of bloat over the years

 

[johnmacward]

I may go that route for that same reason. One does gather a fair bit of bloat over the years

For me, it's a habit I carry over from Windows. Years ago I had far too many problems with upgrades - XP to Vista.

It just didn't work, the implementation was horrible and now I continue it in Mac. Although when I got Lion last week I did the upgrade more so for getting the DMG file (which, remember you have to grab BEFORE you install Lion) and it was flawless. Used it for a few days with no problems.

I don't know what goes on under the bonnet with Mac OS X but holy **** do I have more trust in how it does things, and so upgrades aren't really a problem for me with Mac.

If you have a Mac 2 or 3 years old, then definitely do a clean install. There's a lot of cruft in the background that at this stage is slowing you down and if it isn't causing actual issues you're probably using a system that could perform way better.

 

[-tWv-]

I don't think it's as necessary anymore, but I do it anyways just because I like the way everything feels cleaner and faster afterwards. Feels like I have a brand new computer everytime I do a clean install.

 

[LED]

I'm a clean installer myself. It's my opportunity to lose apps I don't need anymore as I will then reinstall apps only when I need them. In addition, it rules out any upgrade issues if I were to encounter a problem later.

In fact, when I upgraded (did not want to do a clean install) my parents iMac from Leopard to Snow Leopard just recently, the internet connection was failing. I could not get an IP address from the modem. It turns out others had experienced the same, and the fix was to simply create a new network location. Despite this being a simple fix, had I done a clean install, this would not have been an issue.

 

[gentlefury]

Theres no need to, but with Lions release you should be able to easily from now on do a clean install by going to the recovery HD. I'm guessing they might even add a buy now option in the recovery HD for future updates.

 

[neurophysicist]

I had a noob question here, but I have never done a clean install of previous OSs before, but after reading more on the web I realize it may be highly beneficial and potentially help clean up things, rather than a traditional OS upgrade.

I have not yet upgrading to Lion (still on snow Leopard). My noob question is how do you go about putting old files back on your mac (other than applications) after performing a clean installation? (I understand it is better to freshly install many apps after clean installation).

Since I have never done a clean install or knew much about it, I watched this video on clean install and was wondering what everyone's thoughts are and if the method shown will work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irgiVzBwaos

I have a 2011 MBP, an external USB hard drive (previously used for backups), and a thumb drive that I could use (as in the video above). I had time machine backups for some time, but a few days ago I used the superduper program to backup everything.

Please let me know how I would go about replacing old files onto my MBP, after following the process in the video. Thanks.

EDIT: Sorry to repost, but after following the procedure above for clean install, would I be better off just dragging and dropping documents/spreadsheets/photos etc. from my time machine or superduper backed up external drive to my new, lion installed MBP?

 

[RobT]

I still do a clean install and plan to in the future. If there's a chance things will be smoother or faster, it's worth it to me to do the clean install. In addition, after doing a clean install, I always find I have more disk space. Over time misc. stuff builds up and it's nice to get the orphaned files out of the system.

 

[talisto]

I did an upgrade from Snow Leopard first, then a couple days later I decided to do a clean install. My clean install is significantly faster; I think a lot of it is attributed to defragmenting the filesystem in the process. The effort is definitely worth it, I have no regrets.

 

[AndyMoore]

Think that I'm going to do a clean install and reinstall each application. I upgraded to lion but a few apps weren't compatible and there was a strange iPhoto bug so I wiped and did a fresh install and migrated my data across. This seemed to copy over all the rubbish as well as the files and applications I wanted.

I've looked at the console logs and can see all sorts of messages relating to applications that I thought were long gone. So now I think that it might be worth starting from scratch.

 

[GermanyChris]

Clean install on a zero'd out HDD..