Need help/advice on restore for Leopard/Snow Leopard

[jhkaplan]

A few days ago I was messing around with my settings trying to get the top clock bar to also display the date. Something went wrong and now the menu bar doesn't display the time and the battery, and it just keeps flashing back and forth. When I try to go into System Preferences to revert everything back, it crashes anytime I try to go into the Date/Time and/or International Settings, System Prefs crashes, so I can't see any way to get the menu bar back to working without a clean install of OS X. Now, my dilema:

I haven't backed up onto Time Machine in about 3-4 weeks since my external disk is full. All of my work is backed up through Dropbox, so I'm not worried there, but in that time I've downloaded a bunch of music and it's not backed up on TM.

So far here are the options I've come up with:

1. Should I back the music up separately, do a a fresh install of Leopard, restore from TM, and then restore my iTunes?

2. Should I delete some older TM backups and backup fresh again on TM with new settings (so the system prefs aren't backed up), then restore from TM?

3. Since I have Snow Leopard coming tomorrow, should I just wait and install that then do either option 1 or 2?

4. Anyone have any other brilliant ideas that I didn't think about?


Thanks for your help!

 

[uaecasher]

A few days ago I was messing around with my settings trying to get the top clock bar to also display the date. Something went wrong and now the menu bar doesn't display the time and the battery, and it just keeps flashing back and forth. When I try to go into System Preferences to revert everything back, it crashes anytime I try to go into the Date/Time and/or International Settings, System Prefs crashes, so I can't see any way to get the menu bar back to working without a clean install of OS X. Now, my dilema:

I haven't backed up onto Time Machine in about 3-4 weeks since my external disk is full. All of my work is backed up through Dropbox, so I'm not worried there, but in that time I've downloaded a bunch of music and it's not backed up on TM.

So far here are the options I've come up with:

1. Should I back the music up separately, do a a fresh install of Leopard, restore from TM, and then restore my iTunes?

2. Should I delete some older TM backups and backup fresh again on TM with new settings (so the system prefs aren't backed up), then restore from TM?

3. Since I have Snow Leopard coming tomorrow, should I just wait and install that then do either option 1 or 2?

4. Anyone have any other brilliant ideas that I didn't think about?


Thanks for your help!

here we go:

1) yes it's better.

2) but the older ones got the uncorrupted pref right?

3) Indeed

4) Nope *go for choice 3*

edit: when getting snow leopard just do the upgrade option, no data will be lost

 

[jhkaplan]

Re: 2

The older ones don't have the corrupted prefs. I just messed up the prefs within the last week or so, so it hasn't had a chance to backup yet. If I do a new backup with TM, but tell it not to backup prefs, will that work?