Time Machine and 3rd party apps

[adyork]

I have a quick question regarding Time Machine Back-Ups and OS X reinstall and such. I have a MBA and the Leopard Install Disks. I recently bought a WD My Book to use with Time Machine to do a complete back up my abundantly full hard drive, which I completed last night ( all 80 gigs). The problem I am having is that I am afraid that if I do an Erase and Install of OS X I will lose all my 3rd party apps. I recently moved home from college, and have lost ALL of my disks and related paperwork/prod keys/etc. Would it be possible to use Migration Assistant or some other such program to pull all my apps back to a new OS X, or am I just SOL?

 

[ergdegdeg]

When you do an erase & install, you can choose to restore from a Time Machine backup. I've tested that myself

 

[adyork]

Thanks for your help. Just did it last night and it works great. Now all I gotta do is just repartition my external, move my media and repoint Itunes to the new drive partition. Then I should be able to delete all the media currently on my HD, freeing up space, and still have access to music/movies/etc. Correct?

 

[ergdegdeg]

Sounds about right, although I'm not the expert on moving the iTunes library to an external HD