Restoring from Time Machine after wipe and reinstall

[Stuke00]

I am fairly new to Macs but very tech savvy.

If I do a complete wipe and restore of my iMac, can I use time machine to pick things to restore such as my iTunes and iPhoto libraries? Or should I back them up manually?

 

[NeoMayhem]

I am fairly new to Macs but very tech savvy.

If I do a complete wipe and restore of my iMac, can I use time machine to pick things to restore such as my iTunes and iPhoto libraries? Or should I back them up manually?

Yes, you can use the Finder to manually find the files you want, or use Migration Assistant.

It is always a good idea to do a manual backup too though.

 

[shelob8888]

Yes. 🙂

You can either open the time machine file for a specific backup date and choose what you want to restore (drag and drop), or have time machine take your entire disk image back to the state of a certain date in time.

I would not waste time I'm choosing files to back up separately unless you don't want to search through the time machine files.