Formatting and reinstalling OSX. Which path to take?

[theNEOone]

I've been getting slowness, beachballs, and overheating/loud fans over the last few weeks. It feels like it's getting worse by the day. I want to reinstall and get a fresh start. (Btw, I was on Leopard and upgraded to SL...I'm hoping a fresh SL will clear up most of my problems.)

Do I:

1. Restore from a time machine backup
2. Migration assistant
3. Clean re-install and just copy-paste my files

???


I'm not necessarily looking for the quickest solution. I'm looking for the solution that gives me the cleanest start. Re-installing everything will be a pain, but I'll do it if it means better performance.

What I don't want to happen is that I lose library information from iTunes (playlists, ratings, playcounts, etc.) or face/place tagging within iPhoto. Everything else is pretty disposable. (Contacts/calendars are all synced up to Gmail, all my other docs are pretty straight forward.) I can install and/or re-download all my other applications.

Can someone provide a good comparison between the "behind the scenes" processes that occur when I perform a migration? What's actually getting moved? I don't want to copy over files but at the same time copy over non-essential junk that's just a byproduct of months of use.

What's this "All other files and folders nonsense"?

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[flopticalcube]

Migration Assistant. Not really any different than moving stuff over yourself from the machine's point of view but much easier.

 

[theNEOone]

Migration Assistant. Not really any different than moving stuff over yourself from the machine's point of view but much easier.

Cool, thanks. That's what I was hoping, but how do I find out what's in the "Other files and folders" from my screenshot above??


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[flopticalcube]

Could be anything. A VM or dev tools. Check out this thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/775171/

 

[theNEOone]

Nice link - thanks for the info.


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