Preinstalled Iwork - recover from App Store?

[frutter]

I bought a MacBook Air in november 2010 with Iwork preinstalled.

Now, I've been silly and have lost the USB that had backup of Snow Leopard and Iwork.

I am considering buying Lion and doing a clean install (wiping the disk first). But that means that I'll lose the Iwork package.

Does anyone know if I'll be able to download it for free in the App Store? Or will I have to pay for it all over again?

 

[Epic Xbox Revie]

Doing it the way you say, you'd have to re purchase it.

One idea you could try it to copy the iWork applications from your Applications folder on to a separate drive, ie usb drive, or external hdd and copy them back after you install Lion.

Or you could just "upgrade" to Lion without a clean install, this may have the advantage of keeping apps like iwork, but it may also have disadvantages that come with not installing an OS clean.

I am nearly positive the first way would work out just fine.

 

[maflynn]

Just call apple to have them replace the system thumb drive.

 

[aross99]

I haven't tried this with the iWork files, but like one of the the previous posters said, I would copy the files from the application folder and also from the ~/Library/Preferences and see if that is enough to get them to work.

Ideally, you should make a bootable clone of your system to an external hard drive using something like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. That way you have something to go back to if you have any issues, or if you need to grab some old files in order to get the applications to work...

 

[frutter]

Thank you so much for your answers!

I will definitely give it a try with the home-made backup of the applications. Even though it sounds too easy (=good) to be true. I would expect a lot more files lying around everywhere from those apps?

I did try calling Apple. It could be that they are less friendly here in Denmark, but after an hour of being tossed around between different service people, they ended up telling me that I have to buy both OSX Snow Leopard and the Iwork package again. :/