Silly Backup/Restore Question

[revelated]

OK.

If you're reinstalling Snow Leopard, right...and during the process it asks you if you want to restore from backup. Most know about this I'm sure.

My question is simple: Is that actually "reinstalling" Snow Leopard? Or is it just taking the Snow Leopard that was part of the backup? I hear the drive accessing and all, but it doesn't seem to actually be reinstalling anything.

The reason I ask that is, I'm considering a fresh install of Snow Leopard in light of some issues I've had with my month-old MacBook Pro. I used a backup from an old 13" that is configured exactly the way I want and it works fine when it does...and I think there are some driver conflicts in places - RAM, most notably. So I want to give it a fresh start, but if I can't restore from the backup, it means I have to find another means of getting all of my stuff back.

I know I could use Migration Assistant, but that means I'd have to eat up 400GB of one of my external hard drives, probably my FireWire drive. Prefer not to do that, but I will if I have to.

Thanks in advance.

 

[breathesrain]

I've reinstalled SL a few times, both ways. The backup restore is definitely less of a full install, but it's still a significant amount. Since you're having driver trouble, and the "upgrade" style install path would assume you already have drivers to run your computer, I would imagine those would be skipped...but why not do it the easy way, first, and see if your problem is fixed? 🙂

 

[revelated]

I've reinstalled SL a few times, both ways. The backup restore is definitely less of a full install, but it's still a significant amount. Since you're having driver trouble, and the "upgrade" style install path would assume you already have drivers to run your computer, I would imagine those would be skipped...but why not do it the easy way, first, and see if your problem is fixed? 🙂

Well, see that's the question.

I had a 13" MBP 2009. When I was ready to sell it, I captured a full backup with Time Machine, then reinstalled Snow Leopard for the guy that bought it from me. I then bought the 15" and used the backup to restore during the Snow Leopard installation. That worked...but the 15" was the one having issues. The 13" seemed to work fine all the time, never a problem with it.

Now, I've sold the 15" to another guy - during that, I just swapped the hard drives, so I didn't have to do anything else - and I want to give the 17" that I bought a real fresh start. Problem is, I really can't lose any of my data, but at the same time I want to make sure everything installs the way it's supposed to. That's why I was curious if it was actually doing a full Snow Leopard install and just grabbing the settings and apps (similar to a Migration Assistant install) or if it detects Snow Leopard on the backup file and just pulls that in without reconfiguring anything.

In the Windows world, restoring from a Ghost or other image does not involve any brand new install - it's just a snapshot of what was, which isn't always the desired way of handling a machine being deployed.