Just thought I'd share the experience that I had last night. I was trying to optimise the performance of my mid 2010 2.8GHz i5 (quad core) 27" iMac.
I don't know where I went wrong but when I tried to open Pages it would open correctly (there was just no document or templates), then I tried to reinstall iWork (I have it on a disk as there was no Mac App Store until a good 6 months or so after I got my iMac. I couldn't manage to get any of iWork to work, so I restarted only to find that I couldn't log in to my own user account! So I thought "ok then I'll log into my wife's account instead" this didn't work either so eventually I decided to do a clean install (fortunately I have a SSD for my Apps - therefore all my iTunes media is stored on two separate drives).
I expected to lose all my App data, setting etc BUT I didn't! As far as I can tell Time Machine actually repaired my boot drive instead of deleting then installing a fresh install of OS X Mountain Lion!
I must admit that I'm really chuffed!
I don't know where I went wrong but when I tried to open Pages it would open correctly (there was just no document or templates), then I tried to reinstall iWork (I have it on a disk as there was no Mac App Store until a good 6 months or so after I got my iMac. I couldn't manage to get any of iWork to work, so I restarted only to find that I couldn't log in to my own user account! So I thought "ok then I'll log into my wife's account instead" this didn't work either so eventually I decided to do a clean install (fortunately I have a SSD for my Apps - therefore all my iTunes media is stored on two separate drives).
I expected to lose all my App data, setting etc BUT I didn't! As far as I can tell Time Machine actually repaired my boot drive instead of deleting then installing a fresh install of OS X Mountain Lion!
I must admit that I'm really chuffed!