Reinstall of lion, lost all my apps

[hikerobby]

My 11 month old macbook pro has always been pathetic and slow. Lots of spinning wheels of death. I honestly have been disappointed overall--I think macs are a waste of money and don't work any better than $400 pcs but I have made my bed and now I must sleep in it.

So I took it into the apple store today hoping I had bought a dud and it was just super slow b/c of bad hardware. They tested it and it was all fine so they recommended wiping it clean and reinstalling os x Lion. I had backed it up with time machine that morning and after the reinstall I now have all my files where they were, iTunes and playlists work fine. But I lost iPhoto, garageband, and 15 other important third party applications. I can see all the apps when I look at my external hard drive backup under applications, they are all still there. But when I click on them the message says "You can't open the application ____ because it is in a Time Machine Backup." I am very pissed off, not only has this computer sucked all along, but now Apple convinced me to wipe it clean and I am having to spend two days trying to get back to where I started.

Any help would be appreciated, I thought the purpose of time machine was to reinstall everything just as you had it??

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Open the MIGRATION ASSISTANT in Applications / Utilities and select to restore from a Time Machine backup or other disk and then select what you want to restore.

Setting-up a new Mac from an old one, its Backups, or a PC​

After that is done:

If you want to enhance the performance of your Mac, be sure to check these two articles, do not just use applications, that promise to do it for you.

• Performance Tips For Mac OS X
• Mac Performance Guide

And after that:

To learn more about Mac OS X: Helpful Information for Any Mac User by GGJstudios​

 

[hikerobby]

thank you but I already restored everything from a timemachine backup and it didn't work properly. It reinstalled all my documents but not my applications. And now its not recognizing my external drive anymore.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

thank you but I already restored everything from a timemachine backup and it didn't work properly. It reinstalled all my documents but not my applications. And now its not recognizing my external drive anymore.

Then either something is on the fritz, or the backup is not complete or you have or are done/doing something wrong.

If you have the chance, make an appointment with Apple and bring your TM HDD with you.

Anyway, does the HDD show up in Disk Utility?
And as for the purchased applications, you can easily redownload them, the same goes for iPhoto and GarageBand, as your Apple ID is tied to the probably registered Mac of yours, thus you can download those for free.
PS: I have restored many Macs, and it never has taken more than a couple of hours, with cloned backups it is even faster.

 

[hikerobby]

yes my mac HD and my external HD both show up in disk utility.

As for purchased apps, I had been using an old email address iTunes account for years and finally though I migrated them to my gmail address a few months ago and deleted the old account but now it didn't migrate properly and I basically lost anything I bought in the past ten years. I did try that already.

And besides, I have WAY more apps not bought by apple that I am more concerned with having again.

 

[hikerobby]

well I redid it as you told me to, didn't think it would do anything cuz I'd already done it, but this time it found all the programs, they are all working, but it lost all my songs and photos. Itunes is full of my songs but none of them can be found, nor are any of my photos to be found. I HATE APPLE!!!

 

[OMAnders]

Oh no!!

I'm sorry to read this - that sucks. I have a hard drive with an entire macs worth of stuff - all locked up with time machine and I, for some ungodly reason, have no access. If you do get another mac, or if it's running really slow again - (since I have no idea how to help your problem now) check out activity monitor, delete some high useage processes, and then run a 'purge' command on terminal. I've used that to speed up my mac.. it often gets bogged down by safari web content hanging around after it's not needed.

I hope you find a solution soon!

 

[benwiggy]

check out activity monitor, delete some high useage processes, and then run a 'purge' command on terminal. I've used that to speed up my mac.. it often gets bogged down by safari web content hanging around after it's not needed.

You do not need to run "purge". Safari Web Content is not held in Inactive Memory -- perhaps after you've quit Safari, but not before. And Inactive Memory is released when more memory is needed.

As for your other problem: it's hard to say what's going on without much more detail. However, TM backups should only be restored using the TM app, and not through the Finder. You may get permissions problems if you try to browse and copy files in the Finder.

As for the OP: You may find the iLife apps listed in your purchases in the Mac App Store. However, it sounds like you are trying to double click on the app stored on the TM backup. (Or again, that you used the Finder to copy the app over.)
Use the Time Machine application to restore your apps from your backup.