Time Machine making my hard drive dirty?

[pilotkid]

Hello everyone. I have recently upgraded the hard drive in my 2010 MBP, I upgraded it to a Segate 500GB, 7200RPM drive. By doing this I liked the idea of having a brand new hard drive with nothing on it. I installed Snow Leopard via the install disks and all that stuff. I also did a Time Machine restore. A month or so ago I followed these instructions(http://tiny.cc/wsxti) before I got my new hard drive. I found a ton of stuff in the Library>preferences step and the Library>Caches on programs that I no longer had, there were pieces of applications that have not been used in years! When I got my new drive in and did the restore it restored all of the preferences and caches on the stuff I no longer have, and had deleted. Do I need to completely reformat and erase everything on my external Time Machine drive to keep it from restoring all of the things I removed, and then have it do a fresh backup of my current Mac hard drive after I re-delete all the garbage off it again. Ideally I would like to have everything erased on my Time Machine and Mac hard drive except documents, photo's, music, and saved websites in Safari. I want it ALL gone, even settings and stuff like that...I can redo those. I don't need any applications saved either, I have all of the disks for those. How do I get this done?

Sorry for the length, I tried to edit it down as little as I could while being informative.

Also, I searched MacRumors and Google but couldn't find anything for this exact scenario. If you have a link for something other than "cleaning my hard drive" or "restoring my hard drive from time machine" or procedures for the current decade please post them.

Thank you for your time!

 

[Eddyisgreat]

Saving your user data is easy. All you need to do is copy your your user folder from /(Macintosh HD)/Users/ to your external (I suspect you already knew this). Documents, Pictures, music et all should all be in that folder.

Then for Safari, simply do a File > Export to get your bookmarks and such packaged up, then import them on the new machine.

That's what i'd do if you want that "fresh from the shower" feeling. I typically dig in there and do house keeping myself, but I also get into alot of trouble

 

[grahamnp]

You can do a fresh install and then selectively restore the appropriate files and folders from within OSX and the finder. If you do a time machine restore at the install stage it should restore everything and negate any advantage of a fresh install.

Once you've restored your stuff, you will probably need to reformat your time machine drive and start the backups from scratch again.

 

[pilotkid]

Thanks for your quick answers! @eddyisgreat If I copy the users folder to my external drive to then restore it after everything has been wiped clean it would still copy everything in the following folders: Applications, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Incomplete, Library, Memeo Backups, Movies, Music, Pictures, Public, Shared, and finally the Sites folder.

Can I pick and choose what I want from the Users Folder?

Out of the folders above I would only want to keep Documents, Movies, Music, and Pictures.

You can do a fresh install and then SELECTIVELY restore the appropriate files and folders from within OSX and the finder.

@grahanmp Is what I just asked above what you are saying I can do?