Help with Format and Migration

[parmacrafter]

I have a late 2011 MacBook Pro. It originally came with Lion and I upgraded to Mountain Lion on Release day. I did not do a clean install. I just let the upgrade run.

I recently did a really stupid thing and played around with folder permissions. After realizing that I messed some things up I ran the disk utility to repair permissions. It did not solve my current problem. So I am thinking about formatting and doing a clean install.

My question is this....I have a backup in time machine from this morning. I would very much like to use the migration assistant with time machine to restore all my programs and Itunes stuff. If I tell it to restore my whole system from the time machine am I going to be restoring my current problem back onto my system since my newest backup is from after I caused the permissions problem?

Also since I have installed and uninstalled many programs since I got my mac will doing a full restore put all the stray files that were left behind when removing those old programs back too? Any help on this would be great.

 

[EwanMcTeagle]

I have a late 2011 MacBook Pro. It originally came with Lion and I upgraded to Mountain Lion on Release day. I did not do a clean install. I just let the upgrade run.

I recently did a really stupid thing and played around with folder permissions. After realizing that I messed some things up I ran the disk utility to repair permissions. It did not solve my current problem. So I am thinking about formatting and doing a clean install.

My question is this....I have a backup in time machine from this morning. I would very much like to use the migration assistant with time machine to restore all my programs and Itunes stuff. If I tell it to restore my whole system from the time machine am I going to be restoring my current problem back onto my system since my newest backup is from after I caused the permissions problem?

Also since I have installed and uninstalled many programs since I got my mac will doing a full restore put all the stray files that were left behind when removing those old programs back too? Any help on this would be great.

If the backup is from after you messed things up then yes, probably it will restore the mess.

From my own experience: been swapping hard drives yesterday after which I've installed the OS from Time Machine backup and it took longer then I'd wished it had - 1,5 hours. Since I only wanted to avoid installing the apps all over again it was definitely too long - but that may just be me since I have TM backup on another computer with slow hard drives.
Anyways, after the backup Creative Suite was kind of messed up. As I didn't have the patience to play detective I went medieval on it and did a clean install and installed apss from the scratch - basically Office and Creative Suite were the biggest time consumers. At least I have a piece of mind now and the machine works smoothly.
Maybe someone will come up with a better solution as I'm not an expert, but if you messed things up and the system is working badly I would format the drive on boot up and then do a clean install.