I have a 2007 Mac Mini and over time I have added a boot camp partition, installed Parallels, and added a number of programs and utilities. Earlier this year I upgraded to Lion and added a Time Machine backup on an external drive.
Now I want to reformat the Mac Minis drive and do a clean reinstall of Snow Leopard/Lion, eliminate the boot camp partition, and clean out all the unused programs and utilities.
My question is what will happen to my Time Machine backups when I reattach the drive to the clean install. Will my old backups be retained so that I can access them and retrieve selected files if necessary, or will it see the clean install and delete all the prior backups? Anybody had experience with this issue before?
Now I want to reformat the Mac Minis drive and do a clean reinstall of Snow Leopard/Lion, eliminate the boot camp partition, and clean out all the unused programs and utilities.
My question is what will happen to my Time Machine backups when I reattach the drive to the clean install. Will my old backups be retained so that I can access them and retrieve selected files if necessary, or will it see the clean install and delete all the prior backups? Anybody had experience with this issue before?